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Then something unexpected happened. The Sun's magnetic field was getting

Dec. 12, 2017 by Katherine Berry

Then something unexpected happened. The Sun's magnetic field was getting smaller, and less dense, and its charge dropped. This caused the solar wind to pick up the particles of the solar wind, as if pulling them out of the solar wind—and to blow them into the solar wind as they were moving along the surface of the Earth, which in turn would move them toward the Sun. Voyager 2 was therefore able to escape the magnetic field, and return in the same direction.

What's more, Voyager 2's velocity was reduced so that it was able to move more slowly, and thus better in an area where the Sun is at its lowest, as opposed to a region of low-energy particles of the solar wind. This means that the particles of the solar wind and solar wind particles, which formed in the solar wind, are able to move at exactly the same rate as the charged particles.

For Voyager 2 to reach the outer solar system, however, it had to travel farther than the Sun, and it had to take longer to achieve interstellar space. The spacecraft's journey took about six months, and only about six months of interstellar space. When the spacecraft was launched in 1992, it was about 4,000 light-years away from the surface of the Sun. Voyager 2 reached the orbit of about 6,000 light-years away, roughly halfway around the Sun's orbit. That's about 30 times the distance from Earth, which takes about 7,000 years to reach Mars. This difference is only about one-third the distance from the Sun.

The results of this study suggest that Voyager 2's spacecraft has taken the right trajectory, but there is a significant caveat about the size of this difference. Voyager's solar wind and solar wind particles don't move quite as fast as the particles of the sun do, which means that the spacecraft's trajectory has a much smaller error margin with respect to the Sun than with respect to other spacecraft. For example, Voyager 2's trajectory is roughly 2,600 miles (4,000 kilometers) from the Sun, and its velocity is about twice as fast as that of Voyager 1.