12-01-2011, 02:58 PM
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Join Date: Nov 2002
Location: Scottsdale, Arizona
Posts: 10,626
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Remember These From 1977?
V'ger 1 Still Ticking, V'ger II Switched Off
The Voyager probes carried UV spectrometers that could identify Lyman alpha emissions and, as luck would have it, researchers starting using them to scan their surroundings all the way back in the early '90s. (They were actually looking for something else: a spot where the solar system's hydrogen piles up against pressure from the interstellar medium.) These scans continued sporadically for most of the rest of the decade.
Researchers have now gone back and reanalyzed this data, incorporating information on the Voyager's position and the orientation of their observations. The resulting image clearly shows the plane of our galaxy as a bright area, as you'd expect, and there are obvious regional variations in the signal.
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