NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is hurtling out of the solar system at an unimaginable pace. It is at the moment about 8 billion kilometres from the solar, and by the time you end studying this story, it can have sped hundreds of kilometres additional into the frigid gloom. It is lonely on the market. Even the large planet Jupiter is however a tiny speck.
New Horizons is principally identified for giving us our first correct take a look at the dwarf planet Pluto in 2015. Until then, we had solely seen it as a blurry smudge. It has additionally taught us a lot about the solar system’s outer reaches and the small, frozen worlds that float there. “It’s really been an Alice in Wonderland kind of story,” says Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the mission. “It’s been dreamlike and we’ve discovered wonderful things.”
However, the dream isn’t over but as a result of New Horizons could also be poised for a shock closing act. In early 2024, one of its detectors recorded an surprising uptick in the quantity of mud it was encountering. Since that materials might have been created in collisions between rock fragments, astronomers now surprise if there are numerous objects past the rubble-strewn Kuiper belt typically thought of the edge of the solar system. If so, our system’s boundaries will want to be redrawn and our fashions of the way it shaped thrown into doubt.
Stern and his colleagues are clearly eager to take benefit of their probe’s distinctive place to study extra about this unexplored wilderness whereas they nonetheless can. “It’s an…