Voyager 1's Location? Out Among the Stars: Here's Our Message It Takes With It

After months or years of false positives form various sources, NASA itself has announced that Voyager 1 truly has left our solar system. Voyager 1 is the first and only object made by humans to ever drift beyond our star system into the great beyond.

Why so many false positives throughout the last year? The Voyager 1 has been in the last layer of the solar system, called the heliopause, for a while, and scientists on the Voyager Project have been analyzing data from Voyager 1 to distinguish when it was officially away from the last bits of the of the Sun's environment, called the heliosphere. The heliosphere is a bubble made of plasma that stream from the Sun. Analyzing plasma measurements from August 25, scientists deteremined that the drop off of all lower-energy particles indicated that Voyager 1 had now completely exited the realm of our sun.

"We have been cautious because we're dealing with one of the most important milestones in the history of exploration," said Voyager Project Scientist Ed Stone of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena in NASA's announcement. "Only now do we have the data -- and the analysis -- we needed," said Stone. ""We looked for the signs predicted by the models that use the best available data, but until now we had no measurements of the plasma from Voyager 1."

Voyager 1, launched on September 5, 1977, first whizzed past the outer planets of the solar system, providing scientists with valuable data on some of Earth's closest celestial neighbors before heading out towards interstellar space.

It took from about 1990 until now before Voyager 1 truly exited the solar system. In 1990, before Voyager 1 began on its journey away from the solar system, Carl Sagan requested that the Voyager 1 turn its camera around and take a picture of the "Pale Blue Dot" of Earth from a record distance of 6 billion km. This was the result:

Now Voyager 1 is on its own, and will not be near another star until about 40,000 years from now. If Voyager 1 ever meets an intelligence out among the stars, they will find a golden record - a collection of over 100 images along with sounds of nature, a wide variety of music, and audio of greetings in in fifty-nine launguages.

The "Voyager Golden Record" was also an initiative of Carl Sagan, and includes a music selection as highbrow as Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, as contemporary as Chuck Berry's "Johnny B. Goode", and as broad as a Senegalese percussion song.

It also includes a message from then President Jimmy Carter:

"We cast this message into the cosmos ... Of the 200 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy, some - perhaps many - may have inhabited planets and space faring civilizations. If one such civilization intercepts Voyager and can understand these recorded contents, here is our message: We are trying to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope some day, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of Galactic Civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination and our goodwill in a vast and awesome universe."