The U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Agency (NASA) recently confirmed that after 36 years, the Voyager 1 probe crossed the boundary of the heliosphere, or the extent of our Sun’s influence, a year ago. It’s the first manmade object to venture into interstellar space.

At a distance of about 12 billion miles from the Sun, the latest data indicates that Voyager 1 has been traveling through the plasma, or ionized gas, present in the space between stars. The journal Science notes that this corroborates the existence of a long-hypothesized boundary between the solar plasma and the interstellar plasma. Voyager 2, a companion craft launched at the same time, is also expected to break the barrier.

Source: EarthSky.org