Enlarge Jet Propulsion Laboratory A map of the Milky Way. Holiday tidings come from NASA's Voyager 2 this week, offering a view of deep space beyond our sun's solar system. Now speeding through space at more than 34,000 miles-per-hour, the 1977 space probe resides more than 8.3. billion miles away from the sun. That is twice as far as Pluto. Two years ago, Voyager 2 passed into the region of space where the sun's solar wind peters out as it plows into the interstellar gases of our Milky Way galaxy. And now it's giving us some news from this region, called the "heliosheath," by astrophysicists. "This is a magic mission," says space scientist Merav Opher of George Mason University. in Fairfax, Va.. "After all these years, Voyager 2 is still working and sending us first hand (on-site) data." Voyager 2's vantage, revealed in the Dec. 24 Nature journal in a study led by Opher and colleagues, shows that beyond the solar system, the galaxy's magnetic field is unexpectedly strong, about twice as much as expected, and unexpectedly tilted. Our galaxy is essentially a twin-armed flat disk of stars 100,000 light years across rotating around a spherical ball of stars in its center (one light year is about 5.9 trillion miles.). The study results show the galaxy's magnetic field tilts 30 degrees out of alignment with its disk, where space scientists had originally supposed the two would be perfectly aligned. "We didn't expect such a strong field and this tilted although there were already some indications from our previous studies that the interstellar field has a strong effect on shaping the solar system," says Opher. Earlier this year, for example, NASA's IBEX mission revealed in a Science journal study that a "ribbon" of electrically-neutral particles seems embedded across the edges of the heliosheath in an orientation tilted to the plane of rotation of the planets around the sun. And Voyager 2 last year reported evidence that the entire "heliosphere" carved out by the solar wind flowing off the sun has a squashed shape, indicating the galactic environment was surprisingly strong. In a commentary accompanying those reports in Nature, astrophysicist Jack Jokipii of the University of Arizona in Tucson, said Voyager 2 was, "opening a new age of exploration." The sun's solar wind shields the planets from most of the powerful cosmic rays coming from the galaxy, with effects on everything from space radiation for astronauts to weather, offering a better understanding of the heliosphere with surprisingly down-to-earth applications. Voyager 1, also launched in 1977, lacks a "plasma" instrument to measure high-temperature charged particles in the heliosheath, so it can't make similar magnetism estimates. "The tilted field probably is a result from turbulence in the interstellar medium outside our solar system or results from collisions of clouds in the solar system neighborhood," Opher says. In other words, gas clouds far from our solar system are smacking together in unexpected ways, mixing up the galactic magnetic fields that in turn funnels cosmic rays into the heliosphere. Astrophysicists hope to see Voyager 2 completely leave the influence of the solar wind and travel into true interstellar galactic space before its instruments finally cease to function, expected around 2025. Until then, the spacecraft is our best bet for eyeballing the sun's neighborhood. "The environment of the interstellar magnetic field is not very well understood," Opher says. But, "The fact that we are able to predict the 'weather' or the conditions outside our solar system (while) being inside it still, it's like predicting the weather outside the house being in the bathroom or kitchen!" Guidelines: You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. You share in the USA TODAY community, so please keep your comments smart and civil. Don't attack other readers personally, and keep your language decent. Use the "Report Abuse" button to make a difference. Read more