Voyager 1 Has Almost Left The Solar System

from forbes.com: Voyager 1 was launched in September of 1977 – and now nearly 36 years later, it’s on the cusp of being the first human-made object to ever leave our solar system. Scientists at NASA believe it’s currently in the last region of the solar system before entering interstellar space. The boundary line (well, less a line than a fuzzily defined region) is the edge of where charged particles carried by solar wind travel to.

“This strange, last region before interstellar space is coming into focus, thanks to Voyager 1, humankind’s most distant scout,” NASA researcher Ed Stone said in a press release.

Voyager 1 entered that last region, which NASA has referred to as a “magnetic highway,” in August of last year. In this part of space, the Sun’s magnetic field is intersecting with magnetic fields originating in interstellar space. This causes charged particles from the Sun to speed up and head out of our solar system, while charged particles from interstellar space speed up to zoom into our solar system. Some of what NASA has learned about the region so far has been published in this week’s edition of Science.

It’s not clear yet when Voyager 1 will leave the solar system – scientists won’t know for sure until it actually gets there. That could be anywhere from a few months to a few years away. It’s sister craft, Voyager 2, is also expected to enter interstellar space, but that will be some time later. Both probes have enough power to last to 2020, so we should learn quite a bit about interstellar space before they fall silent.

If either probe happens to meet any extraterrestrial intelligences while it’s out there, though, it won’t matter if they have power or not. Each probe is equipped with a gold record containing images, sounds and other information about us and the Earth. You can see an image of that below:

The contents of the records were selected by a committee led by the late scientist Carl Sagan. It contains music from different time periods and cultures, sounds from the Earth like the wind and surf, and 116 different images. It’s pretty unlikely that anyone will actually find either of the Voyager probes to play the record. But to Carl Sagan, that was part of the magic of the two records.

“The launching of this ‘bottle’ into the cosmic ‘ocean’ says something very hopeful about life on this planet,” he said at the time.