NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is hurtling out of the photo voltaic system at an unbelievable velocity. It’s at present about 8 billion kilometres from the solar, and by the point you end studying this story, it can have sped 1000’s of kilometres additional into the frigid gloom. It’s lonely on the market. Even the large planet Jupiter is however a tiny speck.

New Horizons is especially identified for giving us our first correct take a look at the dwarf planet Pluto in 2015. Till then, we had solely seen it as a blurry smudge. It has additionally taught us a lot in regards to the photo voltaic system’s outer reaches and the small, frozen worlds that float there. “It’s actually been an Alice in Wonderland sort of story,” says Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the mission. “It’s been dreamlike and we’ve found fantastic issues.”

Nonetheless, the dream isn’t over but as a result of New Horizons could also be poised for a shock ultimate act. In early 2024, one in all its detectors recorded an surprising uptick within the quantity of mud it was encountering. Since that materials may have been created in collisions between rock fragments, astronomers now surprise if there are various objects past the rubble-strewn Kuiper belt usually thought of the sting of the photo voltaic system. In that case, our system’s boundaries will have to be redrawn and our fashions of the way it fashioned thrown into doubt.

Stern and his colleagues are clearly eager to make the most of their probe’s distinctive place to study extra about this unexplored wilderness whereas they nonetheless can. “It’s an…