An emissary of mankind has slipped the bonds of the Sun and entered interstellar space, bound for the stars. And when the aliens find it they will discover what a 1970s supermarket looks like, a Welshman’s greeting and a full-scale invasion map so they can return the “hello” in person.

Nasa has announced that the Voyager 2 space probe has become only the second object ever to exit the “heliosphere”, the region in which the solar winds blow. At a distance of 11 billion miles from Earth, the probe, launched in 1977 to explore the outer solar system, has officially been buffeted by the last of the Sun’s charged particles and is in the “interstellar medium”.

Travelling that far from the centre of the solar