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Really? >[Update/Correction (Mar. 19, 2013): I wrote the piece below after reading a press release from the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and after reading

by jere 14y ago

Really? >[Update/Correction (Mar. 19, 2013): I wrote the piece below after reading a press release from the American Geophysical Union (AGU) and after reading the professional science journal paper announcing the results. Just after posting this I received a press release from NASA/JPL quoting Ed Stone, the Voyager project scienist, saying "It is the consensus of the Voyager science team that Voyager 1 has not yet left the solar system or reached interstellar space.... [Emphasis mine.] I then received a follow-up press release from the AGU also backing off the claim of Voyager leaving the solar system.... So to be clear, the science of what I describe below is accurate enough, but the idea that Voyager 1 has left the building is not.

ChuckMcM 14y ago
My guess, is that Voyager being declared "outside" the solar system will happen only after quite of bit of time has passed since it actually left. Like the Higgs Boson, there is data, there is analysis, and there are confidence intervals. One result may be that the instruments send back cosmic ray information that no theory can explain how that would be consistent with being inside the heliosphere. Or it may simply be that the environment stops changing. And after a while that non-changing result is accepted as being "outside" and then you can walk backwards in the data to figure out the first time you got that result (and consequently the last change you saw) and declare the exit that way.
mturmon 14y ago
They called in the big guns. Here's the correcting press release: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-107 http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-107 Ed Stone, the project scientist and the nominal author of this press release, is 77 now. He was 41 when Voyager 1 launched (and he was project scientist then, too). You still see him around JPL and Caltech.

by jere 14y ago

ChuckMcM 14y ago

My guess, is that Voyager being declared "outside" the solar system will happen only after quite of bit of time has passed since it actually left. Like the Higgs Boson, there is data, there is analysis, and there are confidence intervals. One result may be that the instruments send back cosmic ray information that no theory can explain how that would be consistent with being inside the heliosphere. Or it may simply be that the environment stops changing. And after a while that non-changing result is accepted as being "outside" and then you can walk backwards in the data to figure out the first time you got that result (and consequently the last change you saw) and declare the exit that way.

mturmon 14y ago

They called in the big guns. Here's the correcting press release: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-107 http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-107 Ed Stone, the project scientist and the nominal author of this press release, is 77 now. He was 41 when Voyager 1 launched (and he was project scientist then, too). You still see him around JPL and Caltech.