Voyager Has Left the Solar System

Science

It's Official—Voyager Has Left the Solar System

http://xkcd.com/1189/

1. Richard A. Kerr 
After 36 years of hurtling toward the edge of the solar system, the Voyager 1 spacecraft—its sensors failing, its energy running low—has crossed into the abyss of interstellar space. At least, that is now the consensus view of Voyager mission team leaders. This week, four team members are publishing new data from Voyager 1 in Science that the team deems conclusive: Its spacecraft has passed out of the heliosphere, the bubble inflated by the sun's wind of charged particles. Voyager, now six times farther from Earth than the orbit of Neptune, is where nothing from Earth has gone before. 

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The much-anticipated departure of the storied probe, which visited Jupiter and Saturn before heading out of the solar system, may sound like familiar news. Over the past year, there have been reports of its leaving, of its not quite leaving, of its being in a new, special place. There's a reason for the mixed signals. The space physicists' edge of the solar system "is not your usual planetary environment at all," says heliophysicist George Gloeckler, a Voyager team member since the 1960s. Even modern computer simulations could give the researchers no warning of the confusing weirdness Voyager 1 has encountered.

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