Radiolab - Where the Sun Don't Shine

Episode Date: August 23, 2017

Today we take a quick look up at a hole in the sky and follow an old story as it travels beyond the reach of the sun.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. From W. N. Y. C. See?

Yeah. All right, so tell us who you are. And I'm Andrea Nevy's mom. We are in Hopkinsville, Kentucky for the Great American Eclipse. We are about a minute to totality. Oh, look. I can see it even when I'm in, even when it's not. We can hear the cicadas.

And we, and look, I don't even have my sunglasses on, and I can still... You can't look at it with your sunglasses on. You're just holding them up? Yeah. What do you see over this way? Is it looking dark? Yeah, it looks like a storm coming in. Does look like a storm coming in.

Jupiter! Where? Oh, oh my God! Are you looking up? Holy Teleto. Yeah. Stella, look. Look up there. Hey, I'm Chad Abramrod.

I'm Robert Crowlidge. This is Radio Lab. All right, so these last few weeks on planet Earth, on this corner, planet Earth, have been a little confusing, a little crazy. But then there was yesterday. So cool. We all got a reprieve. I just got a chance to look up. Look at that.

Look! Look up at the sun. A couple hundred people sent us recordings from all over the place. I'm in Greeley, Colorado. Helen, Georgia. Nashville, Tennessee. Kenmore, Washington. Carbondale, Illinois.

Sent us recordings of themselves watching the moon pass right in front of the sun. That's the moon in front of the sun. The moon is blocking the sun. That is wild. And I've got to say you hear these recordings, and you can't help but think. I think we're going to be all right. I'm black. So, in honor of this celestial miracle, today we're going to keep looking up.

But not in the direction of the sun. Well, you know, when you look up at the sun, you have to put on these glasses to protect yourself from the sunshine. The sunshine is very powerful, and it stretches across vast, vast, vast, vast distances in space. But what we're going to do at the end of ours, we're going to leave the sunshine behind. We're actually going to escape the sunshine where humans have never been before. Right. And we're going to start with a story that I've been following pretty much my entire career at Radio Lab. you kind of have to rewind back to 1977. I mean, that's not when I started following the story.

That's when the story itself started. In August of 1977, NASA launched a spacecraft, and on the craft was a gold record. And the record carried a message. This was a message from us to them out there. Our story. Now, it was Carl Sagan. The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be.

Who led the team that made that record. And that team included, actually, it was, headed by a woman named And Druyan. And about 10 years ago, I spoke with Annie and we made this story that you're about to hear. I visited Annie at her home in Ithaca, New York, and we sat in the backyard near a waterfall in the same spot, she says, where Carl himself would sit and become so absorbed in what he was reading that he would not notice a deer standing right next to him. My name is Annie Drianne, and I was honored to be the creative director of the Voyager-Iterstellar Message Project, which began in early 1977. How did this come about? I think about the project now, and it's so exciting to think about.

I mean, it's such a romantic idea. Did you know that at the time? Absolutely. We felt, first of all, that this was a kind of sacred. trust that here we were half a dozen very flawed human beings with huge holes in our knowledge of all of these subjects building a cultural Noah's Ark. It was a chance to tell something of what life on Earth was like two beings of perhaps a thousand million years from now because the Voyager engineers were saying this record will have a shelf like. of a billion years. If that didn't raise goosebumps, then you'd have to be made of wood.

It was also the season that Carl Sagan and I fell so madly in love with each other. And here we were taking on this mythic challenge and knowing that before it was done, two spacecraft would lift off from the planet Earth, moving at an average speed of 35,000 miles an hour for the space. the next thousand million years, and on it would be a kiss of mother's first words to her newborn baby. Oh, come on now. Mozart.

Bach. Beethoven. Greetings in the 59 most populous human languages. Shalom. Hello from the children of planet Earth. As well as one non-human language, the greetings of the language. humpback whales. And it was a sacred undertaking because it was saying,

we want to be citizens of the cosmos. We want you to know about us. Tell me about the moment you fell in love with Carl Sagan. You said it was during the Voyager compilation. Yes, it was. It was on June 1st, 1977. I had been looking for some time for that piece of Chinese music that we could put on the Voyager record

and not feel like idiots for having done so. And I was very excited. because I'd finally found a ethnomusicologist, composer at Columbia University, who told me without a moment's hesitation that this piece flowing streams, which was represented to me as one of the oldest pieces of Chinese music, 2,500 years old, was the piece we should put on the record. So I called Carl, who was traveling. He was in Tucson, Arizona, giving a talk.

And we had been alone many times during the making of the record and as friends for three years. And neither of us had ever said anything to the other. We were both involved with the people. We'd had these wonderful soaring conversations. But we had both been completely just professional about everything and his friends. And he wasn't there, left a message. hour later phone rings pick up the phone and I hear this wonderful voice and he said I get back to my hotel room and I find this message and it says Annie called and I say to myself why didn't you leave me this message 10 years ago and my heart completely skipped a beat I can still remember it so perfectly and I said for keeps and he said you mean get married and I said yes

and we had never kissed we had never you know even had any kind of personal discussion before we both hung up the phone and I just screamed out loud I remember it so well because it was this great eureka moment it was just like scientific discovery and then the phone rang and I was thinking oh you know like and the phone rang and it was Carl and he said I just want to make sure That really happened.

We're getting married, right? And I said, yeah, we're getting married. He said, okay, just wanted to make sure. And spacecraft lifted off on August 20th and August 22nd. We told everyone involved, and we were together from that moment until his death in 1996 in December. Wow. Talk about romantic. My God. It was so romantic.

And part of my feeling about Voyager, obviously, and part of my feeling, what I was feeling in the recording of my brain waves, my heart, my eyes, everything, in that meditation on the record, I had asked Carl whether or not would be possible to compress the impulses in one's brain and nervous system into sound and then put that sound on the record and then think that perhaps the extraterrestrials of the future would be able to reconstitute that data into thought. And he looked at me in beautiful May Day in New York City and said,

well, you know, a thousand million years is a long time, you know. Why don't you go do it? Because who knows? You know, who knows what's possible in a thousand million years? And so my brainwaves and REM, every little sound that my body was making was recorded at Bellevue Hospital in New York. This was two days after Carl and I declared our love for each other. And so what I often think is that maybe 100 million years from now,

you know, somebody flags that record down. And I always wonder it, because part of what I was thinking in this meditation, was about the wonder of love and of being in love, and to know it's on those two spacecraft. Even now, whenever I'm down, you know, I'm thinking, and still they move 35,000 miles an hour, leaving our solar system for the great wide open sea of interstellar space. Billions of years from now, the sun will have reduced this planet to a charred, ashy ball.

But that record with Androion's brainwaves and heartbeat on it, will still be out there somewhere intact in some remote region of the Milky Way, preserving a murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished on a distant planet. So that's how we ended the original story with that quote from Carl Sagan. And it happens to be actually the 40th anniversary of the Voyager Probes launch. I mean, we're sort of in between the two dates where Probe 1 and Probe 2 were launched. And so we were thinking about the anniversary, and our producer Amanda Ranchet called up Androyan again.

And they got to talking about the fact that we still, scientists are still talking to those probes. That's the thing that gets me. Here we are 40 years later. And Voyager 1, we're still in contact with Voyager 1. We still know where Vorager 1 and 2 are. We were able to build something so well that with the energy, which is essentially more feeble than the energy in a toaster,

we can communicate with Voyager as she leaves to wander the Milky Way Gallery. See, intact, with the message intact. Well, those same engineers said it would work for a dozen years. It's 40 years, and it's still working. So coming up, we're going to ask, where are they actually? Where specifically are those two probes now? And the answer is, they're in a very, very, very undiscovered place.

I mean, they are learning things that we have never known. Right it on out like a bird in the skyways, riding on out like you were a bird. Fly it on out like an eagle in the sunbeams right on out like you were a bird. Hey, this is Becca. I'm calling from Dallas, Texas to let you know that Radio Lab is supported in part by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at Dublin.

www.sloan.org. Hey, I'm Chad Abumrod. I'm Robert Crilwich. This is Radio Lab. And now we're going to ask, where are those Voyager probes right now? I mean, again, this is a story we've been following forever. And about five years ago, producer Lynn Levy

began to ask herself that question. Where are they? Because at that point, news was starting to bubble up that the Voyager probes were about to tiptoe their way across a truly amazing threshold. And at that moment, it wasn't completely clear what was happening.

So here's what we reported then. We're going to break in at a certain point and update things even further, but Lynn began this story. We're the last one left off. Okay, so like in the point of the mission wasn't really to deliver this record. It was to go out and look at all the planets

in the outer solar system. So starting in 1977, these two little spaceships, two spacecraft, Voyager, one of the world, went racing away from Earth, snapping pictures. And so every time Voyager would reach another planet, you know, all of the Voyager people would get together, go into the imaging room and see the pictures come from the outer solar system. Do you remember seeing them?

I remember as a child saying Life magazine. You know, I was seven when Voyager was launched. This is Mervav. A Mervofer, professor at Boston University. As a grown-up, she became part of the Voyager. All the pictures that, you know, as a kid, you look at the books and to see what, how Neptune look, how Jupiter look. You know, just a complete revelation. Saturn.

The image of Saturn. Technicolor. Like pink and reddish. Turquoise color. Yellow. And those rings. Just spectacular. They could see active volcanoes on one of the moons of Jupiter.

Finally, that vision of Neptune. This, like, blue jewel. Really blue. It's all came from Voyager. We had no idea how they looked like before Voyager. Neptune was the last big, cool planet, and it was the last thing they were supposed to photograph. After that, the cameras were going to be shut off to save energy.

But CalSagan convinced them to turn Voyager back to Earth and take a final picture. So on Valentine's Day, 1990, one of the ships slowly rotated, so it was facing back to Earth. and it snapped a picture. One last picture. Describe it. So it's mostly empty. It's pretty dark. You can see sort of streaks of light coming from the sun.

And then you honestly wouldn't notice it if it wasn't pointed out to you. But down in one corner, kind of suspended in a sunbeam. There is a very small dot blue. a pale blue dot. That was us. In Carl Sagan's words, everyone you ever knew, everyone you ever loved,

every superstar, every corrupt politician, just everyone in all of history, everything, the sum total. Think of the rivers of blood that have run so that one indistinguishable group could have momentary domination

over a fraction of that. It was one of those really rare images. Every single day I hear from people who take that pale blue dot so deeply to heart. It was a complete reframing. After that, the cameras were turned off. But here's the thing. The ships kept going, going, going, drifting through the darkness. Even though they weren't taking pictures anymore,

they were using their other senses, little instruments that detect, like, how many particles are around, what the temperature is. So they were hurtling through this empty space really fast, measuring, sending that data back. And scientists like Meraev were there listening and waiting. For what? It was not clear. But they knew at some point these capsules would get to the edge. The edge of what? The solar system.

The solar system has an edge. I thought it was just a big spiral. It has an edge. It's like a bubble. See, the sun has a wind. Every star has a wind, but the sun has its own wind. That blows out through the solar system. It's very fast.

It can be between 400 to 800 kilometers per second. Anyway, it blows out from the sun, past all the planets, and it keeps everything else out. Oh, so it's like blowing up a balloon? Yeah, exactly. The wind gives it a shape. Right. So these little things are cruising out towards this edge, wherever it is. Scientists don't quite know where it is, or where it is.

what it is. The guys in the control room are like pinging the ships and like, hey, what's up? What do you see? And the ships are like, nothing. Well, how about now? Not much. No? Nothing. And how long before they actually see something? 14 years. Oh, man. That's like driving through Kansas, but like a million times worse. But there comes a day. End of 2004, where they've stopped listening for a little while because the antenna, NASA only has so many antennas and they have to use them to listen to everything. So for a little while, the Voyager team's like, okay, you guys over there can use the antennas

we're going to lunch. Yeah, I mean, it's not like anything's happening. Nothing's happening anyway. It's been 14 goddamn years. Knock yourself out. You guys, it's cool. And they come back. A few hours later, start listening again.

And... It's happened very sudden. Everything is totally changed. All of a sudden? Boom. The speed of the wind drop from around 380 kilometers per second to 100.

instantly, like just all it wants. And then everything out there started to get messy. Very turbulent. Much more turbulent than before. Particles are also behaving in a very different way. And the fields are very weird. The fields. The magnetic field.

So just like the sun has a wind. The sun has a magnetic field as well. The field starts at the sun and then curves out in this kind of graceful arc through the solar system. And how the sun rotates create what people call by Lavinna skirt. You know how like a skirt will flare if you spin around real fast? That's apparently kind of what this field looks like. But way out there, it seemed like the skirt had started to fray, maybe tear a little. Threads had broken off and seemed to be floating around on their own, not connected to anything.

So what does this all mean? I mean, if the fields are breaking down and the wind is dying down, and you said the wind is what actually creates the space of the solar system, does this mean we're out? No. I kind of thought that was what was happening, but no. It's not out, and it's not quite in. It's in the edge of the bubble.

It's in the edge. Yeah, but it's not like a little thin edge. It's a thick edge. So the edge isn't. just a little line that you cross at the place. Yeah. And while we listened, the two Voyager ships moved through this edge for several years. Then something very interesting happened that the wind on Voyager 1 stopped.

Like completely stopped? Yeah. So now we're out? No. No. I mean... This is what people thought. But the other measurements...

Like temperature, a number of particles, the magnetic... field. Doesn't tell us that we are out of the bubble. Nature surprised us again. So now we think there's a place at the edge of our solar system. Right at the edge. The edge of the edge. That's utterly still, no wind at all. A pause. People are calling it a stagnation layer. And there is a big discussion why this layer exists and how thick it is. And by how thick it is, she means, when will it end? Because once we get past this. So has anything ever cross? this boundary before? No, this would be the first man-made object to leave any star.

And Voyager is like right there, smiling, touching that boundary. You know, you only do those things first once. Like your first kiss, your first taste of alcohol, your first time driving a car, the first time you see the ocean. These things open up a whole new world. First time out of the solar system. So when is it going to freaking happen? It might have happened while we were talking.

Yeah. We're thinking from now, any moment now, next couple of months or three years from now, four years from now. It's close. Every day I open my Google Alert for Voyager and I look and see, did it happen today? Do you really? Because if it happens before the show goes out and we'd be pissed. Yeah. Every day.

Yeah. It's the first thing you do in the morning? Oh. All right. Good. Like the third thing. Okay, so when producer Lynn Levy left that story, at that point five years ago, it seemed like the Voyager probes were in this weird liminal space kind of stuck somewhere in the edge of the edge of our planetary neighborhood.

And at the out moment, that transition moment, could happen at any time. That's where we left it. Which seemed honestly kind of frustrating. Like we did the story too soon. You know, like that happens every so often. So we decided to call Morav Ofer back. She's a scientist you heard in the story who is part of the Voyager team. And we asked her to pick up the story.

Like, what happened? Okay. So since then, we were waiting, right? Right. And this story is fascinating and a little complicated, too, because this was back in 2012, right? She says shortly after our story was released. A couple of months later, so was in August, around August, 2012. About six months after our story.

The particles, this was. fascinating. The energetic particles from the sun dropped. So some people thought, oh, no sun particles, that must mean we're out. But a couple of days later, they came back. Huh. And then there was the same intensity as before, and then

they dropped again. It's almost felt that somebody had to open a window and then close a window, and then open a window, and close a window. Oh, wow. So it was kind of weird. That is weird. You expect the classic crossing. It should be sudden. It should be

or you're in or you're out. You don't have this intermediate. I'm in. I'm out. I'm in. I'm out. I know. So this was not the classic textbook and was very like what's going on. And there was very heated discussions because you know you're waiting

to say to the public, are we really cross the solar system for the first time or not? And we cannot say. That must have been frustrating. Super frustrating. And she says scientists started arguing. I mean, there was a bunch of conferences and meetings where they got together,

and the scientists essentially broke into factions. Like, you had one faction that was like, we are out. Another faction was like, no, no, we're in. And she says, at one of those meetings. There was a vote. Are we in or are we out? And I just felt this is crazy. This is such a major milestone.

I know you can't vote on it. It has nothing to do with us. Exactly. It was almost like Christoph Columbus. Did we really arrive to America's a vote? And it was just crazy. But she says they did vote. And the vote was still we're inside.

So towards the end of 2012, that's what they thought. We're still in. But... Something changed. And something is the sound we were hearing. Around the time of these arguments, the Voyager was sending back sound. The Voyager doesn't have a lot of energy on board, right? So they have a tape recorder.

Wait, there's a tape recorder? Really? Yes. I think it's an A-track. What? Like an A-track? A-track? Jet, I think. It turns out it's true. There are eight tracks on both of the probes that are capturing ultra-low frequency plasma waves. Two to three kilohertz. Which you can actually hear. Now that whoosh... That is just the background of the power supply.

That's just the sound of the Voyager itself idling, basically, cruising through empty space. But she says when you listen to the following recording, this is what you're about, to hear is eight months of time, from late 2012 into 2013, eight months collapsed into a tiny clip. What you hear are these little swells. There's one. There's another. You have those ramps. Now this bar gets kind of confusing. Essentially Morav says those swells, that's the Voyager space craft colliding with some new galactic stuff. So you're hearing there is a ramp of density as you go into the interstellar space. I had thought that those sounds, one of those two sounds,

is the Voyager bursting out of our solar system, but she told me... No, no. What it is, is the sound of the Voyager already on the other side. It's the Voyager basically saying, I'm in a new space now. And after some analysis in this part, I cannot explain, NASA pinpointed the ejection moment, the crossover moment, to just before the first of those two swells. So if this is the first swell, it's just before that.

Maybe right there. Like right? There. That's when we left. It's so undramatic. But we finally escape. Official exit date. 25th of August of 2012.

So now we have a human manufacture So fly it on out like an eagle In the sunbeams Right down out Like you were a bird So now we have a human manufacture That has left the sphere of the sun That's on the other side

In the other ocean Yeah It's like I'm I don't know It's a bit of sweet To see all this incredible data That Voyager is giving us and I want more.

I would like another mission there. It's almost like somebody giving you like a taste. Look how interesting this data is and whooped, they're leaving. Speaking of leaving, Merov says that we can expect to communicate with the Voyager probes

for about another 8 to 10 years, but then eventually they will lose power and go dark. It's recording. What time is it? It's 1133. One more minute. We're getting close.

It's getting so. Just a sliver of a sliver left. 30 seconds. It's getting dark. It's okay. Oh, look all the lights are turning on. Yeah. The street lights have turned on.

We are about 10 seconds from total eclipse. Oh, there's go. Oh my god! Whoa, it's almost gone! Look at that. Look! Look up at the sun! Emma, look up! What the... This big black dot in the middle of the sky!

the middle of the sky with white halos coming from it. Oh my goodness. The stars. Look at the stars, Max. There's the bird. There's the bird. She talked about going crazy. And there's Venus.

It's so pretty. It's so pretty. Thank you to everybody who sent in their recordings. Big thanks to producer Lynn Levy, scientist Marav Ofer, Amanda Aronchik for producing this update, and Annie Dorian. To play the message, press 2.

I am Merav Ofer, Professor of Astronomy of Boston University. Radio Lab was created by Jada Boumad and is produced by Sterling Wheeler. Dylan Kiff is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, David Geber, Tracy Hunt, Matt Kidley,

Robert Corwich, Annie McQueen, Lativ Nasser, Melissa O'Donnell, Ariani Wark, and Molly Webster. With help from Rebecca Chason, Nigel Fatali, Seid Wang, and Katie Ferguson. Our fact checker is Michelle Harris. End of message.