THE most distant man-made object – the Voyager 1 spacecraft – is finally leaving the solar system. Astronomers think the probe has reached a boundary where the sun’s influence starts to wane.
“This is a really exciting milestone,” says Stamatios Krimigis of Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Maryland. “It’s the first time a machine has gone outside the cocoon of the solar atmosphere.”
Voyager 1 and its companion Voyager 2 were launched on a journey to the outer planets in 1977. Voyager 1 is now about 90 astronomical units from the sun (one AU is the distance between the Earth and the…
