The following article was published on Dagens.com and written by Asger Risom in November 2025.
NASA confirms Voyager spacecraft has encountered a "wall of fire" at the edge of the Solar System
After nearly half a century of traveling through space, NASA’s Voyager mission has made another astonishing discovery — one that could redefine where our Solar System truly ends.Reaching the unknown
Voyager 1, launched 47 years ago, continues to send back data from farther away than any other human-made object. The spacecraft’s long journey has allowed scientists to glimpse regions of space no probe has ever reached before, offering new insight into the outermost layers of the Solar System.
According to NASA, Voyager 1 has now encountered what researchers describe as a “wall of fire,” a zone where temperatures reach between 30,000 and 50,000 kelvin — roughly 30,000 degrees Celsius. The finding was made as part of ongoing efforts to understand the boundary separating our Solar System from interstellar space.
The edge of the Solar System
Scientists have long debated where the Solar System actually ends. Some define it by the limits of the planets’ orbits; others, by the reach of the Sun’s gravitational and magnetic influence. The most accepted boundary is the heliopause — the outer edge of the heliosphere, the vast bubble created by the Sun’s constant stream of charged particles, known as the solar wind.
“The Sun emits a constant stream of charged particles called the solar wind, which eventually travels past all the planets to a distance three times greater than that of Pluto before being stopped by the interstellar medium,” NASA explains. “This forms a giant bubble around the Sun and its planets, known as the heliosphere.”
The heliopause, then, is the frontier where the solar wind’s strength fades and the interstellar medium begins. Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have now crossed this line, making them the only spacecraft ever to venture into true interstellar space.
Aligned magnetic fields
One of the most striking findings from this mission concerns the alignment of magnetic fields beyond the Solar System’s edge. NASA said that Voyager 2’s measurements confirm what Voyager 1 had detected years earlier — that the magnetic field just outside the heliopause runs parallel to the field inside the heliosphere.
“An observation made by Voyager 2 confirms a surprising result from Voyager 1: the magnetic field in the region just beyond the heliopause is parallel to the magnetic field inside the heliosphere,” NASA noted. With data from both spacecraft, scientists can now confirm that this alignment is not a coincidence but a defining characteristic of the boundary region.
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The following article was published on Debrief.com and written by Ryan Whalen in November 2025.
NASA's Voyager 1 Probe Will Reach One "Light Day" From Earth Next Year
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Based on the most recent estimates, the revolutionary Voyager 1 space probe is expected to achieve the feat on November 15, 2026, continuing its reign as the farthest-travelled human-made object. After flying by Jupiter, Saturn, and Titan, the spacecraft continued its journey into interstellar space.
The Speed of Light
Based on present-day physics, scientists know the speed of light is the greatest speed at which anything in our universe can travel. That astronomical rate is clocked at 186,000 miles per second. Due to the immense distances separating points in outer space, scientists have adopted the distance light travels in one year, 5.88 trillion miles, as a universal measurement scale.
Proxima Centauri is the star nearest to our own, even though that cosmic neighbor is 4.2 light-years away from Earth. Over four years of light-speed travel would be required to cross such a distance.
For shorter distances in space, scientists rely on astronomical units, which are equal to the distance between Earth and the Sun. Although humanity has yet to conquer light-speed travel, Voyager 1 still manages to zip along at the relatively quick 11 miles per second. This adds up to 3.5 AU each year as the craft continues its journey.
Communications Challenges
Somewhere in the middle of these two ends of the cosmic measuring scale is the less commonly used figure known as the “light day,” denoting the distance light travels in a single Earth day.
That distance has begun to add up and impact the effectiveness of communications with Voyager, which are maintained through NASA’s Deep Space Network. Mission engineers spent weeks last November dealing with just one episode of technical difficulties due to communications lag. At billions of miles from Earth, the commands and responses took 23 hours to travel in each direction from Voyager 1 to Earth.
During that event, silicon dioxide from a rubber diaphragm had accumulated in a fuel tank, cutting off a crucial fuel thruster tube. Thrust was drastically lowered, as the liquid hydrazine fuel was impeded from flowing freely. It took 40 small thrusts from the obstructed system to even push Voyager into proper alignment for effective communication with Earth.
In the end, the mission engineers elected to return to a set of thrusters that had themselves been turned off years earlier due to malfunctions, although of a less severe sort than those plaguing the system last year. At one point during the operation, power was so low that the mission team had to take the calculated risk of turning off Voyager 1’s heater in deep space to power the systems required to bring the old thrusters back online.
The Future of Voyager 1
Despite the challenges of communicating over such a massive distance, NASA plans to maintain contact with Voyager 1 as it crosses the monumental 16.1 billion-mile threshold to reach one full light-day from Earth.
The celebration may be bittersweet, though. Three radioisotope thermoelectric generators power the craft, which are expected to run out of energy in the next decade. Many of Voyager 1’s systems are no longer functional, as those generators are even now providing much less power than the craft utilized at launch. Over the years, many concessions have been made, reverting to backup thrusters, disabling instruments, and cutting power to keep the mission continuing long past its expected lifespan.
As such, the one light day milestone may be the last outstanding achievement for humanity’s farthest step into the cosmos.
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"But you, Daniel, roll up and seal the words of the scroll until the time of the end. Many will go here and there to increase knowledge.” ~ Daniel 12:4
“There are heavenly bodies and earthly bodies, but the glory of the heavenly is of one kind, and the glory of the earthly is of another.” – 1 Corinthians 15:40
