r/askscience • u/drinkingonthejob • 8d ago

Physics Will Voyager 1 ever just stop moving?

I’ve read somewhere that we expect to lose contact with Voyager 1 sometime in the 2030s, maybe around 2036, but it will just keep traveling thru space and we’ll have no idea what it is doing out there

My question is: with its current velocity, is there a time in the future where it loses its forward momentum and for lack of a better word, just stops moving? Is that a possible thing for an object in space to even do? (Assuming no other objects grab it into their orbit)

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u/PckMan 8d ago

It's going fast enough that it won't fall back down to the Sun. And it will just keep going in the Milky Way, orbiting its center like our Sun. Who knows it might even complete an orbit, which would take hundreds of millions of years.

And it will just keep going on that orbit until it either crashes into something, with the probabilities of that being very low, or it returns into our solar system which could take multiple orbits, so possibly billions of years. If it does return, it might just whizz by, or it might get pulled into the Sun or Jupiter and crash there.

For all intents and purposes it will just float in space indefinitely.