I’m looking at a couple of interesting tidbits as I while away the last few minutes of work before the holiday weekend.<\/p>\n
The first is news<\/a> that the Voyager II space probe, launched way back in 1977, seems to be approaching the “edge” of our solar system, which is defined by a phenomenon called the “termination shock.” This is where particles blown outward by our sun start to turn back inward because of a flow of incoming particles from outside the system. The interesting thing is that the termination shock seems to occur sooner in the “southern” region of our system, where Voyager II is, than in the northern region. (Voyager I crossed the northern termination shock about a year ago, but it was farther away when the event occurred than its sister ship is now.)<\/p>\n The other item<\/a> is further evidence in support of one of my pet theories, which is that the world is becoming more and more like Star Trek<\/i> all the time: scientists believe we might be able to build an actual cloaking device<\/a> before too many more years using “metamaterials” that bend electromagnetic energy around them. A more detailed article on this research can be found here<\/a>. Very cool news. I really wouldn’t mind living in a Star Trek<\/i> world. As long as we don’t all end up wearing velour or spandex jumpsuits, or suits with feet in them like jammies…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I’m looking at a couple of interesting tidbits as I while away the last few minutes of work before the holiday weekend. The first is news that the Voyager II space probe, launched way back in 1977, seems to be approaching the “edge” of our solar system, which is defined by a phenomenon called the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-final-frontier"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=569"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jasonbennion.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}