A representative image of Voyager-1 travelling through interstellar space. (Source: Nasa)
When Voyager-1 was launched on September 5, 1977, the team that worked on the probe had no idea that even after four decades, the spacecraft would still be sending critical data pings and that too from beyond the Solar System. Now in interstellar space, the area beyond the magnetic bubble inflated by our Sun, Voyager s data is revealing what that new frontier is like.
A study published in Nature Astronomy reports what may be the first continuous measurement of the density of material in interstellar space. “This detection offers us a new way to measure the density of interstellar space and opens up a new pathway for us to explore the structure of the very nearby interstellar medium,” said Stella Ocker, a Ph.D. student at Cornell University and part of the Voyager team.