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A NASA probe has become the first man-made object to travel beyond the Solar System, the American space agency revealed last night.

Scientists said that Voyager 1's instruments indicate it has drifted beyond the bubble of hot gas from our Sun and was now moving in the space between the stars.

And it's incredible feat was achieved on less power than an iPhone. The Voyager has reportedly less than 40KB of memory, whilst a 16GB iPhone 5 has 240,000 times that.

Professor Ed Stone, chief scientist on the mission, said: "This is really a key milestone that we'd been hoping we would reach when we started this project over 40 years ago - that we would get a spacecraft into interstellar space."

Launched in 1977, Voyager was sent initially to study the outer planets but it kept on going.

The veteran spacecraft is now almost 12 billion miles from home - so far away that it takes 17 hours for its radio signals to reach Earth.

Professor Stone added: "This is historic - one of those journeys of exploration like circumnavigating the globe for the first time or having a footprint on the Moon for the first time.

"This is the first time we've begun to explore the space between the stars."