Voyager 1 Nears Final Frontier Of Solar System

The Voyager 1 is about to leave our solar system.

That may come as a surprise since the interstellar probe reportedly left the solar system earlier this year. NASA corrected the mistake and said that the Voyager 1 is now in a new region of space but hasn’t quite left the solar system.

According to the TG Daily, the Voyager 1 is now about 11 billion miles from the sun and will soon became the first human-made object to reach interstellar space.

New data about the Voyager 1’s journey was published in the journal Science today. Charged particles from the sun are still being recorded by the Voyager but the probe is also seeing interstellar particles. The research papers state that the probe is now in the heliosphere depletion region.

Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, said: “This strange, last region before interstellar space is coming into focus, thanks to Voyager 1, humankind’s most distant scout. If you looked at the cosmic ray and energetic particle data in isolation, you might think Voyager had reached interstellar space, but the team feels Voyager 1 has not yet gotten there because we are still within the domain of the sun’s magnetic field.”

Particles from the sun are slowly disappearing but the Voyager 1 is still on the “magnetic highway” produced by the sun.

Stamatios Krimigis, the low-energy charged particle instrument’s principal investigator at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md., said: “We saw a dramatic and rapid disappearance of the solar-originating particles. They decreased in intensity by more than 1,000 times, as if there was a huge vacuum pump at the entrance ramp onto the magnetic highway. We have never witnessed such a decrease before, except when Voyager 1 exited the giant magnetosphere of Jupiter, some 34 years ago.”

Researchers know that the Voyager 1 is still in our solar system but they aren’t quite sure how long it will remain there. It could be days, months, or years until the interstellar probe leaves the magnetic highway.

[Image Via Nasa]