NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has encountered a "magnetic
highway" at the edge of the solar system, a surprising discovery 35
years after its launch, the experts behind the pioneering craft said
Monday.
Earlier this year a surge in a key indicator fueled hopes that the
craft was nearing the so-called heliopause, which marks the boundary
between our solar system and outer space.
But instead of slipping away from the bubble of charged particles the
Sun blows around itself, Voyager encountered something completely
unexpected.
The craft's daily radio reports sent back evidence that the Sun's
magnetic field lines was connected to interstellar magnetic fields.
Lower-energy charged particles were zooming out and higher-energy
particles from outside were streaming in.
They called it a magnetic highway because charged particles outside
this region bounced around in all directions, as if trapped on local
roads inside the bubble, or heliosphere.
"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," said Edward Stone, a Voyager
project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology,
Pasadena.
"We believe this is the last leg of our journey to interstellar
space. Our best guess is it's likely just a few months to a couple years
away. The new region isn't what we expected, but we've come to expect
the unexpected from Voyager."
Voyager is now 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) away from the
Sun, which is 122 times the distances from the Earth to the Sun. Yet it
takes only 17 hours for its radio signal to reach us.
Scientists began to think it was reaching the edge of our solar
system two years ago when the solar winds died down and particles
settled in space the way they would in a swamp.
An increase in the number of cosmic rays in May also led them to believe Voyager had approached interstellar space.
In July the reading changed again, and by August 25 Voyager was on
the magnetic highway. The number of particles from the outside jumped
sharply and the number of particles from the inside fell by a factor of
1,000.
"It is as if someone opened the floodgates and they were all moved
down the river, also some boaters powered up stream with close to the
speed of light have been able to get in at last," said Stamatios
Krimigis, Voyager's principal investigator of low-energy charged
particles.
While the magnetic field is exciting, Krimigis sounded somewhat disappointed that Voyager had not yet escaped the solar system.
"Nature is very imaginative and Lucy pulled up the football again,"
he said, making reference to the classic comic strip Peanuts in a
conference call with reporters.
The twin Voyager craft -- Voyager 2 was actually launched first, on
August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5 -- were designed
primarily to study the biggest planets in our solar system, Jupiter and
Saturn.
Taking advantage of a planetary alignment, they fulfilled that
mission before pushing on to Uranus and Neptune, beaming back stunning
images of the first two in 1979 and 1980, and the latter pair in 1986
and 1989.
But with those jobs complete and both craft still functioning
perfectly, project managers decided to keep mining information as the
devices fly further into the void.
NASA has described Voyager 1 and its companion Voyager 2 as "the two
most distant active representatives of humanity and its desire to
explore."
The scientists controlling Voyager 1 -- whose 1970s technology gives
it just a 100,000th of the computer memory of an eight-gigabyte iPod
Nano -- decided to turn off its cameras after it passed Neptune in 1989
to preserve power.
Assuming the craft continues to function normally, they will have to
start turning off other on-board instruments from 2020, and it is
expected to run out of power completely in 2025.
