Over the years, the Voyager-1 spacecraft has sent a ton of useful and interesting and sometimes even unexpected information to Earth. In recent years, scientists believed that the probe would leave the limits of solar influence and become the first man-made object to reach interstellar space. But that did not happen. Until. Nevertheless, scientists began to receive information about strange behavior and processes in the region, where in their opinion nothing should have happened.
Several scientific journals published articles about the fact that last August Voyager 1 entered a rather strange area in which it is located to this day. At first, scientists thought that the probe had nevertheless left the limits of the solar system, and this opinion even had several premises. First, the solar wind in this area has become noticeably weaker over the past few days. Secondly, scientists noticed an increased concentration of highly charged particles, which in their opinion fell into this area from outside the solar system.
“We have witnessed a very sharp, about 1000 times more noticeable than before, decrease in solar wind particles. It’s as if a huge vacuum pump took it and pumped them all out with incredible speed and power, ”says Stamatios Krimigis, who is responsible for the operation of the low-energy particle detector on the Voyager-1 apparatus.
"We have never seen such an intense decline before, except in the case that happened 34 years ago when Voyager 1 passed through a giant layer of the Jupiter magnetosphere."
We already have two important signs that the device still left the solar system with a high concentration of low-energy particles and entered the interstellar space with a high concentration of highly charged particles from supernovae and other massive cosmic events. But scientists have not yet recorded the third most important event, which would say with full confidence that the probe left our system.
The fact is that the angle of the magnetic field around Voyager 1 has not changed. In other words, the probe is still under the influence of the magnetic field of the Sun, which means that technically it has not yet entered the interstellar space. Unfortunately, at the moment there is no way to find out what the spacecraft actually sees before itself, just as there is no way to determine exactly when exactly Voyager 1 will be able to escape from the influence of the Sun’s magnetic field - it may take several days, several months, or maybe even years.
The article is based on materials .
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