Voyager has left the Solar System

NASA has confirmed that the probe Voyager 1 has left the solar system and is now the first man-made object to do so.

09:50 13 September 2013

NASA has confirmed that Voyager 1 has just become the first man-made object to leave the solar system. Currently, it is about 11 billion miles from the sun and flying through the space between the stars. 

 

NASA scientist Ed Stone said in a statement: “Now that we have new, key data, we believe this is mankind’s historic leap into interstellar space.”

 

Meanwhile, scientist Don Gurnett shared the overall atmosphere in NASA when the discovery was made. In a press release, he said: “We literally jumped out of our seats when we saw these oscillations in our data — they showed us the spacecraft was in an entirely new region, comparable to what was expected in interstellar space, and totally different than in the solar bubble. Clearly we had passed through the heliopause, which is the long-hypothesized boundary between the solar plasma and the interstellar plasma.”

 

With the current location of the Voyager, it has now given scientists the capability to improve their knowledge of what conditions are like in interstellar space. It will help gather information until 2020 when it’s batteries start to run out.