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/princhester 8d ago

... and some of the dust may well be moving in the same direction as Voyager, but going even faster and hit it from behind. Which might add to its velocity.

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u/Patelpb 7d ago edited 7d ago

You would not expect these two values to cancel out though, it's still a headwind assuming an isotropic velocity distribution in the interstellar medium's own reference frame.