After the report spread throughout the science community, Voyager project scientist Edward Stone released an official statement:
"The Voyager team is aware of reports today that NASA's Voyager 1 has left the solar system. It is the consensus of the Voyager science team that Voyager 1 has not yet left the solar system or reached interstellar space. In December 2012, the Voyager science team reported that Voyager 1 is within a new region called 'the magnetic highway' where energetic particles changed dramatically. A change in the direction of the magnetic field is the last critical indicator of reaching interstellar space and that change of direction has not yet been observed."
The commotion began early this morning after American Geophysical Union issued a press release. The first line of that statement read: "Voyager 1 appears to have traveled beyond the influence of the Sun and exited the heliosphere, according to a new study appearing online today."
After NASA released its official statement, AGU revised the headline of its press release to indicate that Voyager 1 had entered a new region of space rather than exited the solar system.
NASA launched the Voyager 1 mission 35 years ago. Today, it is about 11 billion miles away from Earth. Last August, the spacecraft detected a sharp change in cosmic rays, suggesting it had reached the very edge of our solar system. In December, NASA confirmed Voyager 1 had entered a new region of the solar system — dubbed a "magnetic highway" — that is the "final area the spacecraft has to cross before reaching interstellar space."
Study author Bill Webber, professor emeritus of astronomy at New Mexico State University, notes that scientists are still in debate about Voyager 1's location because the edge of the solar system is basically uncharted territory.
“It’s outside the normal heliosphere, I would say that,” Webber said. “We’re in a new region. And everything we’re measuring is different and exciting.”
The report, which was funded by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, will be published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
Image courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech