We got ourselves all excited for NASA's Mars press conference today, even though we already knew it wasn't about life on the red planet, but what we should have been paying attention to was happening nearly 11.5 billion miles away in the heliosphere. The Voyager 1 spacecraft has encountered a new region of our solar system. What's even more exciting is that NASA scientists believe this region is the final barrier between Voyager and interstellar space. That's so much more impressive than chlorine on Mars.

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The Voyager missions have yielded many surprising discoveries about our solar system and, despite being 9 billion miles away from Earth, the data continues to pour in. Now, scientists at NASA are saying that they have made sense of some surprising readings from the spacecraft over the past few years. Their data indicates that the edge of the solar system is a frothy stew of magnetic bubbles. For years it was assumed that the heliosheath, the outer limit of our sun's magnetic field and the boarder of galactic space, was composed of graceful arcs of magnetic energy that curved back toward the sun. The reality is far less neat and tidy. Instead of arcs, the magnetic field is broken into a membrane of distinct bubbles, each about 100 million miles wide. The whole mix is also apparently writhing around, its movement being compared to bubbles from a jacuzzi jet. Don't worry, if none of this makes any sense, there's a soothing and explanatory video at the end of this post. With pictures!

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Voyager 1, an unmanned probe that NASA launched into space in 1977 to study the outer planets in our solar system, is still doing remarkable things 30 years after it photographed Jupiter and Saturn. According to a Voyager Project scientist, new data from the probe indicate that it is nearing the boundaries of interstellar space, the space between stars where matter becomes even more sparse. 10.8 billion miles from the Sun, Voyager 1 encountered a crucial shift in the solar wind, the charged particles emitted by the Sun: The wind's outward velocity had slowed to zero and the wind was only detectable from the side, indicating that the spacecraft had crossed a key threshold within the heliosphere, the 'bubble' blown by the solar wind which marks the boundaries where the strength of our sun's solar wind exceeds that of other stars.

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