geekosystem

We got ourselves all excited for NASA's Mars press conference today, even though we already knew it wasn't about life on the red planet, but what we should have been paying attention to was happening nearly 11.5 billion miles away in the heliosphere. The Voyager 1 spacecraft has encountered a new region of our solar system. What's even more exciting is that NASA scientists believe this region is the final barrier between Voyager and interstellar space. That's so much more impressive than chlorine on Mars.

Voyager 1, an unmanned probe that NASA launched into space in 1977 to study the outer planets in our solar system, is still doing remarkable things 30 years after it photographed Jupiter and Saturn. According to a Voyager Project scientist, new data from the probe indicate that it is nearing the boundaries of interstellar space, the space between stars where matter becomes even more sparse. 10.8 billion miles from the Sun, Voyager 1 encountered a crucial shift in the solar wind, the charged particles emitted by the Sun: The wind's outward velocity had slowed to zero and the wind was only detectable from the side, indicating that the spacecraft had crossed a key threshold within the heliosphere, the 'bubble' blown by the solar wind which marks the boundaries where the strength of our sun's solar wind exceeds that of other stars.