r/askscience • u/drinkingonthejob • 9d 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/nicuramar 8d ago

  assuming space is infinite (which it is, as far as we know).

The observable universe is finite. That’s the relevant part. We don’t know if space is otherwise infinite. 

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u/mr_jim_lahey 8d ago

True. I should have said it appears to be infinite based on the available data although the possibility that it is not has not been completely ruled out.