Where is New Horizons? Does it also carry the coordinates of the Earth? Will it attract alien abduction?

Many people have been exclaiming that we should not talk to aliens and should not reveal the coordinates of the earth, otherwise we will be hit by the dark forest, and alien invasion and plunder will lead to the extinction of mankind! This statement, especially from the late famous physicist and popular science writer Hawking, has made many people believe it.

But most scientists do not believe this ridiculous rumor. Since the 1970s, they have used radio telescopes to send the first letter to aliens. They have also carried cards and CDs marking the coordinates of the Earth and the Sun, as well as human greetings, on four unmanned probes that have flown out of the solar system, hoping to establish contact with aliens.

These four probes are Pioneer 10, 11 and Voyager 1, 2. They have long completed their solar system exploration missions and are flying towards deep space beyond the solar system. The farthest one is Voyager 1, which is 23.3 billion kilometers away from us.

It is often said that carrying coordinates on these spacecraft is a very stupid act, but people at that time did not realize the seriousness of this act. In the future, faster spacecraft will be sent to retrieve these spacecraft to prevent this information from falling into the hands of aliens. Spacecraft launched later will never do such a thing again. For example, the New Horizons launched in 2006 no longer carries the coordinates of the Earth.

Is this really the case? Let's find out.

New Horizons' Journey of Exploration in the Solar System The New Horizons probe is the fifth unmanned probe to fly beyond the solar system. It is also called New Horizons. The probe set out in January 2006. Its main mission in the solar system is to explore Pluto and the Kuiper Belt asteroids. It is the probe that has been sent by humans to explore the most distant celestial bodies. After completing its exploration mission in the solar system, it will fly out of the solar system like its predecessors, Pioneers and Voyagers, and head for the distant and unknown starry sky.

After nine and a half years of flying, New Horizons flew past Pluto on July 14, 2015, with a minimum distance of 13,695 kilometers from Pluto and 29,473 kilometers from Charon, with a speed of 13.87 kilometers per second. New Horizons sent back a large number of images and information of Pluto and Charon, allowing people to witness the charm of this planet, which is the farthest from the Earth and was once listed as the ninth planet.

After that, New Horizons has been traveling through the Kuiper Belt. The Kuiper Belt is a dense belt of small celestial bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune, the farthest planet in the solar system. It is 20 times wider than the asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, and has a mass 200 times that of the asteroid belt. It is filled with millions of icy celestial bodies, also known as plutoids, and Pluto is also in this range.

On February 6, 2017, New Horizons spent six days surveying and imaging six Kuiper Belt objects along the way, started its engine to correct its orbit, and then began flying towards the final exploration target of the solar system, "End of the World."

There are two conflicting explanations for the discovery of the "Utmost Point" asteroid in the Baidu entry.

The explanation under the entry "Tianya Haijiao (asteroid 2014 MU69)" is that this asteroid was first discovered by Chinese scientists on June 3, 1997, with the temporary number 1997LK. In 2002, the International Astronomical Union officially assigned it the permanent number 9668.

The explanation under the entry "Arrokoth" is that this asteroid is numbered 2014MU69, officially numbered 486958, with the Chinese name "Arrokoth" and the nickname "The End of the Earth". It was first observed by the Hubble Space Telescope on June 26, 2014. The visual magnitude of this asteroid is 26.8 and cannot be observed by ground-based telescopes.

So how was Tianya Haijiao discovered, and why are there such contradictory statements? This question is left for netizens to discuss. If you know more detailed information, please leave your comments. I won’t go into details in this article, and continue to talk about New Horizons.

On January 1, 2019, New Horizons flew over Ultima Thule, with a distance of only 3,500 kilometers at its closest point, and took and transmitted photos of the asteroid. So far, New Horizons has created a series of observation records of the farthest celestial bodies in the solar system, starting with Pluto, and ending with Ultima Thule, which is 6.6 billion kilometers away from us.

The photos sent back by New Horizons show amazing details of "Utopia": the asteroid is composed of two spheres connected together, with a light red surface and a total length of about 34 kilometers. The larger part named "Utopia" is about 20 kilometers in diameter, and the smaller part named "Haijiao" is about 16 kilometers in diameter. From the shooting angle, "Utopia" looks like a snowman.

New Horizons captured impact craters, sublimation craters, and collapse craters on the asteroid, which are of great significance for studying the formation of the earliest celestial bodies in the solar system. After completing the exploration of "Ultra-End", New Horizons flew forward toward the outer solar system.

Where has New Horizons been and where will it fly to? Real-time tracking information from the New Horizons tracker on the NASA website shows that as of today, June 4, 2022, at 16:06, it has flown to a distance of 7.97 billion kilometers from the sun, with a relative speed of 13.8 kilometers per second, in the constellation Sagittarius, with coordinates of right ascension 19h17m14s and declination -20°13′32″.

This means that it is still a long way for New Horizons to fly out of the solar system, and even if it flies out of the heliopause, it is still a long way to go. Although the heliopause is not considered the edge of the solar system, scientists define it as the boundary with interstellar space, the farthest distance the solar wind blows. If the spacecraft flies out of this huge bubble, it will not receive plasma from the sun, but will be enveloped by plasma from interstellar space.

The solar wind top is about 120 astronomical units from the sun, which is about 18 billion kilometers. To fly out of this boundary, at the current speed of New Horizons, if it does not decay, it will take another 23 years.

Some people are worried that the New Horizons is too slow to escape the sun's gravity, and will be pulled slower and slower by the sun's gravity, and eventually pulled back. This worry is a bit redundant. According to the escape velocity formula, at a distance of 8 billion kilometers from the sun, the speed of escaping the sun's gravity is only 5.759 kilometers per second.

Therefore, as long as there is no extremely small probability event such as being hit by a small celestial body, New Horizons will keep flying, but it will take more than 21,700 years to fly out of the gravitational range of the sun's 1 light-year radius. After that, it will fly towards the distant Sagittarius, the brightest star in which is called ε Sagittarius, and its Chinese name is Ji Su San. It is a binary star system and the 37th brightest star in the sky. It is 144 light-years away from us. It will take 3.13 million years for New Horizons to pass near it.

The direction of Sagittarius is towards the center of the Milky Way, where there is a radio source called Sagittarius A*, which is the largest black hole in the core of the Milky Way, with a mass of more than 4.3 million times that of the sun. If all goes well, it will take 565 million years for New Horizons to reach there.

Does New Horizons carry information about the Earth? Of course it does, because New Horizons itself was built and launched by humans on Earth, and it is full of information about the Earth. In addition to various scientific instruments, New Horizons also carries 30 grams of ashes of Clyde Tombaugh, the scientist who discovered Pluto, a CD containing the names of 434,738 netizens who freely submitted their own names, an American flag, and a 25-cent coin from the state of Florida, etc.

However, New Horizons does not carry the golden disc with the Earth's coordinates and human information like its predecessor, Voyager. To make up for this shortcoming, a group of scientists led by Karl Morgan and Rumberg, designers of the Voyager disc, launched a crowdfunding campaign for "Golden Disc 2.0", which aims to convert the golden disc information carried by Voyager into digital signals, which can be transmitted by radio to the computer of New Horizons for storage and taken to the distant deep space.

The signal can only be sent after New Horizons sends back all the data it has taken in the Kuiper Belt and clears the computer, which will take 1 to 2 years. The upload will take another 1 to 2 years. Now it has been 3 years since New Horizons completed the "End of the World" survey. I wonder if the "Golden Disc 2.0" activity has been completed or shelved? I have not found any information on this.

In fact, even if the upload is successful, the probability of aliens seeing it is very small, because the universe is too big and empty, and life and civilization in the universe are too rare. In fact, humans have been sending radio waves to space to search for aliens since the last century, and have been sending and searching for more than half a century. In addition, countless radio signals are transmitted above the earth every day. These electrical signals propagate at the speed of light, and the chance of a small probe encountering aliens is much greater than that of a small probe.

Therefore, if there really are advanced alien civilizations, it is impossible to hide current human activities from them. Carrying earth coordinate information and greetings on the probe is more symbolic. The chance of encountering aliens is much smaller than winning the lottery.

The so-called dark forest, aliens coming to plunder the earth, etc. are just some gimmicks in science fiction works, reflecting the ideology of the current low-level human civilization. Humans cannot even leave the earth at their current level of technological civilization, let alone go outside the solar system to plunder; and the resource needs and ideology of high-level civilizations are completely beyond human imagination, so how could they be interested in the earth and humans?

In fact, the mainstream scientific community does not believe this at all. So those who have such concerns should not think too much and just go to bed. Welcome to discuss, thank you for reading.

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