Earth's Surprise Revelation What Voyager 1 Discovered at the Edge of our Solar System

However, two decades before that, Voyager 1 captured one of the most iconic images in spaceflight history. The pale blue dot image, on the other hand, stands out, reminding us that Earth is a tiny outpost of life in an incomprehensibly vast universe. In August 2012, Voyager 1 broke free from the heliosphere, the giant bubble of charged particles that the Sun blows around itself. The discovery was made public the following year in a study published in the journal Science. On that fateful day, the same day that famed Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong died, the probe detected a 1,000-fold decrease in these particles and a 9% increase in galactic cosmic rays, which originate outside the solar system.