THE most distant man-made object - the Voyager 1 spacecraft - is finally leaving the solar system. Astronomers think the probe has reached a boundary where the sun's influence starts to wane.
"This is a really exciting milestone," says Stamatios Krimigis of Johns Hopkins University in Laurel, Maryland. "It's the first time a machine has gone outside the cocoon of the solar atmosphere."
Voyager 1 and its companion Voyager 2 were launched on a journey to the outer planets in 1977. Voyager 1 is now about 90 astronomical units from the sun (one AU is the distance between the Earth and the sun). It is the most distant spacecraft in the solar system, having overtaken the Jupiter probe Pioneer 10 in 1998. Voyager 2 lags behind, at about 73 AU
For years, scientists thought Voyager 1 must be getting close to the solar system's "termination shock". This ...
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