NASA's Voyager has now reached the outer edge of the solar system.  And there is a bizarre new region there that has scientists baffled.

New research suggests the Voyager has almost passed beyond the reaches of the Milky Way; it is still barely in the heliosphere, or the bubble around the sun.

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched 36 years ago, and are returning data from their journey. The first Voyager launched in 1980 and is currently over 120 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun. It has been getting closer and closer to interstellar space.

Once, scientists thought that Voyager getting to this area would be slow and, well, boring. It's proven to be anything but.

Not content with simply being the man-made object to travel farthest from Earth, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft recently entered a bizarre new region at the solar system's edge that has physicists baffled. Their theories don't predict anything like it.

"The models that have been thought to predict what should happen are all incorrect,"  said physicist Stamatios Krimigis of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory.  "We essentially have absolutely no reliable roadmap of what to expect at this point."

Three new papers on Voyager will soon appear, and they highlight scientists' struggle to make sense of the new data.

"I'm convinced that nature is far more imaginative than we are," he said.

The sun produces the solar wind, which carry light and the solar magnetic field. Eventually, the solar wind was thought to hit the interstellar medium, which would bring a new type of ions and a different magnetic field. Voyager hit the edge of the solar wind back in 2003.

Then, about a year ago, the solar wind dropped by a factor of 1,000. This happened very rapidly-in just a few days.

Then suddenly, the galactic cosmic rays increased suddenly, which would be  "just as we expected if we were outside the solar wind," said physicist Ed Stone said. However, Voyager found the rays coming from one direction, and there was no change in the magnetic fields that should have changed.

Scientists are baffled.

 "It's a huge surprise," said astronomer Merav Opher.

 "In some sense we have touched the intergalactic medium," Opher said, "but we're still inside the sun's house."

One article explained this by saying, "it's almost as if Voyager thought it was going outside but instead found itself standing in the foyer of the sun's home with an open door that allows wind to blow in from the galaxy. Not only were scientists not expecting this foyer to exist, they have no idea how long the probe will stay inside of it."

The probe may take months, years, or just days to reach interstellar space-scientists have no idea when.  And their models haven't worked well so far.

Still, however, they say "it's a certainty that the Voyagers will eventually cross the invisible boundary, and that day, humanity will at last become a species of the star".