By Sid Perkins
From Washington, D.C., at the American Geophysical Union meeting
Even though the two Voyager probes launched in 1977 passed the outermost planets in our solar system more than a decade ago, their sensors show that they haven’t yet outrun the influence of the sun.
Instruments on each spacecraft have detected several sudden surges in the solar wind since January 2001, says Robert B. Decker of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Md. These shock waves probably resulted from solar flares produced during the increased sunspot activity associated with the latest periodic surge of solar activity known as the solar maximum (SN: 1/13/01, p. 26: Stormy Weather).