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Move over, Pluto
In today’s newsletter, police nab a pterosaur; donating your booster shot abroad; pandemic cited for decline in births … and the dump revealing million-year-old fossils.
This article is an adaptation of our weekly Science newsletter that was originally sent out on September 1, 2021. Want this in your inbox? Sign up here.
By Victoria Jaggard, SCIENCE executive editor
As a firm believer in the power of words, I was fascinated by the arguments that erupted in August 2012 over the right way to talk about the Voyager 1 spacecraft. According to multiple headlines, that’s when the robotic explorer “left the solar system,” becoming the first human-made object to sail beyond the confines of our cosmic neighborhood.
Or did it?
When most people think of the solar system, they’re imagining the sun and the eight classic planets, with Neptune as the most distant world at roughly 2.8 billion miles. But that’s not really the solar system’s boundary. Technically Voyager 1 sailed beyond the heliopause, the border zone where charged matter streaming from the sun
