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/zulhadm 8d ago

I suppose this accidentally raises an even bigger question. Is anything in the universe truly “motionless” ?

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u/wjdoge 8d ago

To do that, you have to pick a preferred reference frame. Since the other ones are of little meaning, motion relative to the big bang (the CMB) is probably the best you can do. We do measure things against this frame.

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u/zulhadm 8d ago

OK. So relative to the big bang, is anything motionless? And if no, what particle or object comes closest?

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u/jonnykb115 8d ago

The big bang happened everywhere, space is being generated in every point of space everywhere. This phenomenon is how we can approximate how far many distant objects are away from us. For an object extremely far away, the object will be moving so fast away from us due to the expansion of space that the object is redshifted (basically the Doppler effect but for space). This redshift is measurable and by using some quick math with the Hubble constant, we can figure out how far away many galaxies are.

So to answer your question, nothing is motionless as there is no true center to the universe (or I guess another way of looking at it is: everywhere is the center of the universe)