On November 5, 2018, the NASA Voyager 2 spacecraft reached interstellar space, going beyond the limits of the hyleosphere, according to a press release on the agency’s website.
Now Voyager 2 is just over 18 billion kilometers from Earth and is entering a new phase of its journey. The mission team still communicates with the probe, however information moving at the speed of light reaches the ground antennas 16.5 hours after sending.
Working with the Voyager mission makes me feel like an explorer, because everything we see is new. Despite the fact that Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause in 2012, he did it in another place and at another time and did not transmit full data on speed, density, temperature, pressure and solar wind flow to Earth.
-John Richardson , a member of the research team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)
The most convincing evidence of the release of the Voyager 2 beyond the heliosphere was provided by data from the onboard instrument Plasma Science Experiment (PLS). At Voyager 1, the similar tool stopped working back in 1980, long before it crossed the heliopause.
According to PLS, until recently, the space around Voyager 2 was filled mostly with plasma flowing from our Sun. This stream, called the solar wind, creates a heliosphere – a bubble that covers all the planets in our system. Recently, PLS began to notice a sharp decrease in the velocity of particles of the solar wind, and on November 5, surrounded by the probe, the solar wind was completely quiet. This allowed the mission scientists to say with confidence that Voyager 2 left the heliosphere and went into interstellar space.
It is worth noting that, although Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have left the heliosphere, they still have not gone beyond the solar system and will not do so in the near future. It is believed that its boundary lies beyond the outer edge of the Oort Cloud, a collection of small objects that are exposed to the gravity of our star. The width of the Oort Cloud is not exactly known, but scientists estimate that it starts at a distance of about 1000 astronomical units from the Sun and extends to about 100,000 astronomical units. Voyager 2 will take about 300 years to reach the inner edge of the Oort Cloud, and possibly 30,000 years to go beyond.
Voyager 2 spacecraft went into interstellar space
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