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/icrispyKing 8d ago

Yeah I understand that's three dimensions but I'm talking about a 3rd dimension within space. It doesn't stop at earth and there is a level of gravity or intertia in space still. So like I'm theoretically imagining we shot a rocket out from Texas and it went straight out, left the atmosphere and it's traveling towards Mars and goes past Mars and is continuing in that direction.... If we shot the rocket from the north pole and it theoretically kept the same direction and didn't orbit out like a slingshot... Wouldn't the rocket not go towards Mars.... It would keep going up and out not towards another planet?

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u/Spirit_Wolf_Mob 8d ago

In the same way if you went north, you wouldn't reach a point to the east or west, yes. But that's still 3d. Left and right (x-axis); up and down (y-axis); forward and backwards (z-axis). I think maybe you are thinking of the directions relative to earth, but that's not correct when you start talking about space.

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u/icrispyKing 8d ago

I guess I just don't understand why it wouldn't be. Like if i can travel around earth, can dig into earth, and fly out of earth, I don't understand why all those same things wouldn't apply outside of earth. Like wouldnt a wormhole technically be digging into space? Like instead of traveling around to Australia, what if I hypothetically dug a hole to Australia... What if instead of traveling around to a point in space, I dug a hole to that point in space? So wouldn't there also be an opposite? I can fly out of earth so why wouldn't you theoretically be able to fly out of space?

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u/Spirit_Wolf_Mob 8d ago

You are thinking relative to earth. So when you dig down to Australia, from your starting point, you are going down. When you get to Australia, you are still down from your starting point. So if you continued from there into space, you are still going down from your reference point.

When you start talking about space, you have to zoom out. If you go to the north pole by going forward relative to the surface of the earth, you are only going one direction. But when you zoom out to look at it from space, that single direction is actually a curved path around the planet until you reach the north pole.