Stellar Breakthrough

[krpalmer]

News that Voyager 1 was about to report, or was possibly reporting, it had outpaced the best effort of the solar wind and had crossed into "interstellar space" seems to have been around for a while now. On hearing an official announcement of it, though, I did perk up and spent a while digesting it. Remembering a reference to this in the National Geographic article about the probe's encounter with Saturn in 1980, I looked it up only to notice the suggestion it would reach "the outer edges of the solar wind" "a decade from now"; the theory does sort of stand in contrast to actual evidence. Looking up more information on this, I was also intrigued to see that some of the proof came from a coronal mass ejection that only needed a year to catch up to the probe; of course, Voyager 1 is larger than the individual particles and can also still report to us after a journey longer than it had been built for. There are, of course, things going around the sun much further out than it, but what it's managed resonates with me.