MOSCOW, December 4 (RIA Novosti) - NASA's Voyager 1 probe has encountered a new region at the edge of our solar system, NASA reported on Monday.
Scientists say the area may be the last one Voyager 1 has to cross before reaching interstellar space. This is because our sun's magnetic field lines are connected to interstellar magnetic field lines, which causes lower-energy charged particles that form inside our heliosphere to zoom out and higher-energy particles to stream in.
"Although Voyager 1 still is inside the sun's environment, we now can taste what it's like on the outside because the particles are zipping in and out on this magnetic highway," Voyager project scientist Edward Stone, who is based at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, said as quoted by NASA.
Stone called the new region “the last leg of our journey to interstellar space,” adding that it is “likely just a few months to a couple years away.”
The new results were described at the American Geophysical Union’s meeting in San Francisco on Monday.
Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is the most distant human-made object, about 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from the sun. According to NASA, the signal from Voyager 1 takes some 17 hours to reach Earth.
