What did Voyager 2 find?

I fell into a burnin’ ring of fire

I went down, down, down

And the flames went higher

And it burns, burns, burns

— Johnny Cash

Voyager 2 is 42 years old.

The space-craft left the gravitational pull of Earth when I saw Star Wars as a five year old in 1977.

It is now traveling at 17 km per second, or 11 miles per second, going faster than anything ever made by mankind. It is roughly 14 billion miles away from the sun …. about 150 times as far away as the sun is from us. In 40,000 years it will flyby a star called AC +79 3888.

Voyager 1 probe finally left our solar system in August 2012 … and what has it just run into?

As it is passing through the heliopause of our solar system – the area just before interstellar space – it detected a rise in temperature of between 30 and 50,000 Kelvins … due to a massive increase in the density of the plasma in that region.

For a comparison … the temperature on the surface of the sun is 5,778 Kelvins. So as the Voyager missions leave our solar system completely and head into the nothingness before they reach the Oort cloud …. they hit a wall that was actually 8 or 9 times hotter than the surface of the sun.

So the next time somebody tells you that space is cold …