kateoplis:

Voyager 1 Speeds Toward the Brink of Interstellar Space (previously)

The Voyager 1 spacecraft is 11 billion miles from the sun. And every minute, it gets 636 miles closer to its destination: the frontier of interstellar space. The craft is currently in what NASA calls, not undramatically, “the boundary between the solar wind from the Sun and the interstellar wind from death-explosions of other stars,” an area that astrophysicists also call, less dramatically, a stagnation layer. When Voyager 1 crosses that threshold, it’ll become the first man-made object to do so. […] 

“We want to explore interstellar space itself,” [Voyager program chief scientist Dr. Ed] Stone says. “We have some ideas of what’s out there, from data, and observations from Earth. We believe that we are in a cloud of material that was ejected by the explosion of a series of supernova, about 5 to 10, 15 million years ago, very near the sun. And that we will be embedded in the material from those giant explosions, and the magnetic field which was swept up by the shells of material ejected by those exploding stars. So, we’re very interested in learning more precisely what’s really outside of the bubble, pressing back inward.”

Excuse me, “stagnation region”? Correct your speech, astrophysicists!