latimes:Voyager 1 has officially left the solar systemIt may...
An artist's impression of NASA's Voyager 1 space probe passing behind the rings of Saturn
A NASA image of one of the Voyager space probes. Voyager 1 and its identical sister craft Voyager 2
This file artist's concept by NASA/JPL-Caltech shows Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 at the edge of the solar system.
Voyager 1 has officially left the solar system
It may have taken 36 years of coasting through space, but the Voyager 1 spacecraft has entered interstellar space, becoming the first man-made probe to reach that far-off realm.
The scientific community has been debating whether Voyager had already left for some time now, but it wasn’t until today that NASA was confident enough to made the estimate official.
Lead author Don Gurnett, an Iowa State plasma physicist and a Voyager project scientist, said the data showed conclusively that Voyager 1 had exited the heliopause — the bubble of hot, energetic particles that surrounds our sun and planets — and entered into a region of cold, dark space called the interstellar medium.
Read more over at Science Now.
Photos: NASA
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