Artist concept of NASA’s Voyager spacecraft. Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

“The Voyager team is aware of reports today that NASA’s Voyager 1 has left the solar system,” said Edward Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. “It is the consensus of the Voyager science team that Voyager 1 has not yet left the solar system or reached interstellar space. In December 2012, the Voyager science team reported that Voyager 1 is within a new region called ‘the magnetic highway’ where energetic particles changed dramatically. A change in the direction of the magnetic field is the last critical indicator of reaching interstellar space and that change of direction has not yet been observed.”

To learn more about the current status of the Voyager mission:http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2012-381

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Looking up through hundreds of colored filters and spectral glasses, 526 people shattered the record for the Largest Astronomy Lesson. Under the Texas night sky, students were instructed on the lawn of the Long Center for the Performing Arts at the South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin on Sunday, March 10, 2013.

In the spirit of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) Education Coalition outreach at SXSW, NASA, the Space Telescope Science Institute (STScI) and Northrop Grumman organized the record breaking event which was arbitrated by the Guinness World Records organization. In breaking this record, instructors aimed to shine light on the importance of astronomy with the full-scale model of the James Webb Space Telescope as their backdrop.

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Image Credit:Kepler’s supernova remnant

(X-ray: NASA/CXC/NCSU/M.Burkey et al; Infrared: NASA/JPL-Caltech )

A new study using data from NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory points to the origin of a famous supernova. This supernova, discovered in 1604 by Johannes Kepler, belongs to an important class of objects that are used to measure the rate of expansion of the universe.

Astronomers have used a very long Chandra observation of the remnant of Kepler’s supernova to deduce that the supernova was triggered by an interaction between a white dwarf and a red giant star. This is significant because another study has already shown that a so-called Type Ia supernova caused the Kepler supernova remnant.

The thermonuclear explosion of a white dwarf star produces such supernovas. Because they explode with nearly uniform brightness, astronomers have used them as cosmic distance markers to track the accelerated expansion of the universe.

However, there is an ongoing controversy about Type Ia supernovas. Are they caused by a white dwarf pulling so much material from a companion star that it becomes unstable and explodes? Or do they result from the merger of two white dwarfs?

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