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Added 1 new A* page:The big space news today was confirmation that the Voyager-1 probe has left the Solar System--in fact, new calculations show that it left the bubble blown in space by the Sun's magnetic field and entered the interstellar medium on August 25th of last year. So huzzah! Launched in 1977, Voyager-1 is cruising along at about 100,000 mph (45 km/s), some 12 billion miles (19 billion km; 17 light hours) from Earth; the crossing point out of the Solar System occurred at about 11.25 billion miles, or 121 Astronomical Units (1 AU is Earth's distance from the Sun). Now it's got about 10 years of juice left in its plutonium power pack to measure the interstellar medium directly, something which, obviously, we've never been able to do before. It's already "revealed a near-100-fold jump in the number of protons occupying every cubic metre of space" in crossing out of our Solar System. This is real, galactic space now! Exciting stuff!
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