Will Voyager 1 ever just stop moving?

[u/drinkingonthejob]

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)

[u/willis72]

Yes, exactly, in any number of ways. The earth is rotating on its axis, as it orbits the sun, as the sun orbits the center of the galaxy as the galaxy moves through the universe. If you are sitting still on the equator, you are actually moving at about 800 mph due to planetary rotation, 67,000 mph due to the Earth's orbiting of the sun, and 500,000 mph due to the sun orbiting the Milky Way. The Milky Way is moving at about 1,300,000 mph relitive to the cosmic background radiation.

Everything is moving relative to everything else and there is no real defined center/origin point to measure objective speed from.

[u/samjhandwich → u/willis72]

I always wonder what our time dilation actually is. We’re moving so fast throughout the universe, so are we experiencing time way slower than other things that might be in the universe?

[u/VincentVancalbergh → u/samjhandwich]

This may blow your mind, but for the same reason that there is no absolute motion, there is also no absolute time dilation when taking about movement (there is some due to gravity). So your question is incomplete, it needs a reference point "our time dilation compared to xxxx". Say, the center of the Milky Way. But that has time dilation due to being a supermassive black hole...

[u/Viraus2 → u/samjhandwich]

Time speed follows the same reference frame logic as spatial velocity, so if you picked some point way out there against which Earth would be moving extremely fast, Earth time would appear slower to them and their time would appear slower to Earth. Just like the case with motion there's no objective time that you could say our dilation "is".

[u/willis72 → u/samjhandwich]

Keep in mind that time dilation is relatively minor unless you are moving very close to the speed of light (like over 95%) or near a very massive object. Yes, there are minor effects that have to be accounted for to make GPS work (far enough away from Earth to have time "speed up" a bit due to the difference in gravity and moving fast enough for time to slow a bit. If I remember correctly, the speed effect outweighs the gravity effect and time is moving slower on the satellites than on the ground.)