NASA‘s Voyager 1 spacecraft is now officially the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. The 36-year-old probe is about 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) from our sun.
New and unexpected data indicate Voyager 1 has been traveling for about one year through plasma, or ionized gas, present in the space between stars.
Voyager is in a transitional region immediately outside the solar bubble, where some effects from our sun are still evident.
“Now that we have new, key data, we believe this is mankind’s historic leap into interstellar space,” said Ed Stone, Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena.
“The Voyager team needed time to analyze those observations and make sense of them. But we can now answer the question we’ve all been asking — ‘Are we there yet?’ Yes, we are.”
Voyager 1 first detected the increased pressure of interstellar space on the heliosphere, the bubble of charged particles surrounding the sun that reaches far beyond the outer planets, in 2004.
Scientists then ramped up their search for evidence of the spacecraft’s interstellar arrival, knowing the data analysis and interpretation could take months or years.
NASA placed a kind of time capsule on Voyager 1 and 2-intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials. The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record — a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. (Credit: NASA JPL)
Scientists do not know when Voyager 1 will reach the undisturbed part of interstellar space where there is no influence from our sun. They also are not certain when Voyager 2 is expected to cross into interstellar space, but they believe it is not very far behind.
For a sound file of the oscillations detected by Voyager in interstellar space, animations and other information, visit: http://www.nasa.gov/voyager and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/interstellarvoyager/.
For an image of the radio signal from Voyager 1 on Feb. 21 by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory’s Very Long Baseline Array, which links telescopes from Hawaii to St. Croix, visit: http://www.nrao.edu/.
Source: http://www.kurzweilai.net/voyager-1-embarks-on-historic-journey-into-interstellar-space
