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The heliopause is the final known boundary between the heliosphere and the interstellar space that is filled with material, especially plasma, not from the Earth's own star, the Sun, but from other stars. [46] Even so, just outside the heliosphere (i.e. the "solar bubble") there is a transitional region, as detected by Voyager 1. [47]
The nearest star is 4.2 light-years away, and at 15.341 km/s, the spacecraft travels one light-year in about 19,541 years - during which time the nearby stars will also move substantially. In roughly 42,000 years, Voyager 2 will pass the star Ross 248 (10.30 light-years away from Earth) at a distance of 1.7 light-years. [94]
Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause and entered interstellar space on August 25, 2012, making it the first spacecraft to do so. [9] [10] Two years later, Voyager 1 began experiencing a third wave of coronal mass ejections from the Sun that continued to at least December 15, 2014, further confirming that the probe is in interstellar space. [11]
The Oort cloud (/ ɔːrt, ʊərt /), [1] sometimes called the Öpik–Oort cloud, [2] is theorized to be a vast cloud of icy planetesimals surrounding the Sun at distances ranging from 2,000 to 200,000 AU (0.03 to 3.2 light-years). [3][note 1][4] The concept of such a cloud was proposed in 1950 by the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, in whose honor ...
When it was first observed, it was about 33 million km (21 million mi; 0.22 AU) from Earth (about 85 times as far away as the Moon) and already heading away from the Sun. ʻOumuamua is a small object estimated to be between 100 and 1,000 metres (300 and 3,000 ft) long, with its width and thickness both estimated between 35 and 167 metres (115 ...
Venus, the closest planet to Earth is (at closest approach) 0.28 AU away. Neptune, the farthest planet from the Sun, is 29.8 AU away. As of January 20, 2023, Voyager 1, the farthest human-made object from Earth, is 163 AU away, exiting the Solar System at a speed of 17 km/s (0.006% of the speed of light). [1]
Voyager 1 is now using a radio transmitter it hasn’t relied on since 1981 to stay in contact with its team on Earth while engineers work to understand what went wrong. As the spacecraft ...
The Kármán line (or von Kármán line / vɒn ˈkɑːrmɑːn /) [2] is a conventional definition of the edge of space. It is not universally accepted. The international record-keeping body FAI (Fédération aéronautique internationale) defines the Kármán line at an altitude of 100 kilometres (54 nautical miles; 62 miles; 330,000 feet) above ...