Voyager 1 zips into solar system dispute

• Voyager 1 has for years been crossing the boundary where the solar wind peters out beyond Pluto
• The craft left the protection of the solar wind in August
• Voyager team disputes the report

NASA's venerable Voyager I spacecraft may have become the first man-made object to leave the solar system, an astronomer suggests.

But NASA isn't buying it, at least not yet.

Scientists have been anticipating this moment for years but the boundary between the edge of the solar system and what's called interstellar space has been something of a moving target. Astronomers say it's the point where the stream of electrically changed particles from our sun, called the solar wind, peter out and in turn the cosmic rays from distant exploding stars coming from other directions become the dominant form of radiation.

The distances are somewhat mind-boggling. Pluto is about 3.7 billion miles from the sun. Voyager is now about 11 billion miles away, where any signal it sends takes 17 hours to reach Earth.

For several years, the spacecraft, launched in 1977, has been crossing through the edge of the "heliosphere," the bubble of charged solar particles created by the solar wind that shields our solar system from these distant galactic rays. The size of the heliosphere expands and contracts depending on the strength of the solar wind.

On Aug. 25, 2012, astronomers report in the Geophysical Research Letters journal, galactic cosmic ray intensity suddenly doubled as measured by the spacecraft, indicating it had traveled beyond the protection of the solar wind. This boundary marks the edge of the sun's heliosphere.

"The cosmic ray intensity went up as you would expect if it exited the heliosphere," said astronomer Bill Webber of New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, in a statement. The observation had been presented in December a scientific meeting, but hadn't been accepted for publication into a scientific journal, until now.

But the scientists behind the Voyager mission are taking issue with the finding. "The Voyager team is aware of reports today that NASA's Voyager 1 has left the solar system," said Caltech's Edward Stone, in a statement on the newly released study. "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."

Further, a Voyager mission guest investigator, astrophysicist Merav Opher of Boston University, disputes the idea that the spacecraft has actually left the solar system. "The magnetic field it measures is one completely dominated by the sun's influence," she says.

That means Voyager 1 is actually in a sort of newly discovered boundary region, Opher says, "one we never expected at the edge of the heliosphere." A series of papers from Voyager scientists will be published in upcoming weeks dealing with the dispute over the solar system's edge, she adds.