Voyager finds solar system is bigger than thought
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NASA officials have been saying for months that Voyager 1 is almost there when it comes to interstellar space as it continues the longest road trip in the history of mankind.
On Monday, project officials said new information sent back from the ship yielded a surprising result.
"If we would have only looked at particle data alone, we would have said we're out of the solar system," said Tom Krimigis, a scientist from Johns Hopkins University who examines data on low-energy charged particles. "But nature is very imaginative, and Lucy pulled up the football again."
The Voyager team believes this region is where lines of magnetic particles from the solar system are meeting particles from interstellar space.
Because the direction of the magnetic lines is unchanged, the project members count this as part of the solar system. When the direction changes, Voyager 1 will finally be in interstellar space.
Voyager 1 is now about 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from the sun.
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http://www.cnn.com/2012/12/03/us/spa...html?hpt=hp_c2