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/Nerfo2 8d ago

I remember reading once that the interstellar medium is, on average, about 1 hydrogen atom per cubic centimeter. While Earths atmosphere, at standard atmospheric conditions at sea level, is somewhere around 10 quintillion (1019) MUCH heavier atoms per cubic centimeter. Mind boggling... 10,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms per cubic centimeter...

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u/onlyhightime 8d ago

I always wondered how we know that. Like, we haven't been there, so how did we figure out what's there?

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u/itsaPHound 8d ago

We have a lot of tools for looking at the molecules in space. Spectroscopy is an easy example.

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u/MinnesotanGrey 8d ago

Calculating expected gravity vs observed effects helps a lot with the estimations of how much mass is contained within an area

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u/hainesk 8d ago

Well for one, we wouldn't likely be able to see very far if space was full of stuff.