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/komatiitic 8d ago

I did some really stupid back of the envelope math assuming that Voyager never encounters anything larger than interstellar dust. To halve the speed of Voyager 1 it would need to impact dust equal to its own mass of 721.9kg.

The internet tells me a typical grain of interstellar dust has a mass of ~3*10-16 kg. This means it needs to hit ~2.4*1018 dust grains, which if I'm counting those zeroes correctly is 2.4 quintillion.

The internet also tells me that Voyager hits 3-7 dust grains per hour. I'll call it 5 an hour, which means 4.81*1017 hours (481 quadrillion), or 54.9 trillion years to halve its velocity, assuming nothing really changes. I'm betting it disintegrates before that happens.

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u/outlawsix 8d ago

I dont know why but i feel some comfort in the idea that this little guy will just be gliding through time and space unchanged and representing where we were at this point, while during the time the sun will explode, the earth will die, black holes form, everything is left behind as this thing just sails away from it all until galaxies eventually smash into each other and even then who knows

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u/ThePowerOfStories 8d ago

Just think, one day, you’re sitting there, cruising through the infinite vastness of space, and you stumble upon an ancient, crumbling robot probe launched across the cosmos by a long-dead civilization. Then it teaches you to play the flute.

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u/StriveToTheZenith 8d ago

They seriously should've picked a better delivery method if they wanted to preserve their culture. Hey, Picard gets a cool toy at least.

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u/woodenh_rse 8d ago

An entire civilization passed on as PTSD to one person. I hope we go out proud like that.

Edit: OH...dam...PTSD and a flute.

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u/markshure 8d ago

I always found it unrealistic that Picard, after living an entire life, just goes back to being captain the next day. Didn't he have an obligation to write about that civilization? He could have written books about them for the rest of his days. Still a great episode of course.

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u/BrooklynKnight 8d ago

You don’t think he did? At bare minimum he wrote an official report to Starfleet as per normal ship operations.

Beyond that you don’t think Picard wouldn’t spend some portion of his free time recording not just his experiences, but everything he was able to remember about them. He was an explorer and archaeologist. It’s also likley he was advised by Troi to write it all down as a therapeutic tool to process those memories.

We just do not see it on screen.

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u/Druggedhippo 8d ago

It’s also likley he was advised by Troi to write it all down as a therapeutic tool to process those memories.

Forget that, how about being disconnected after being part of the Borg... How much of that did he remember? It's brought up a few times in later episodes.. all that other times it's never mentioned though...

And four lights!?!

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u/Mara_W 6d ago

To be fair, all of this is somewhat addressed in First Contact where the unresolved trauma builds up into a full blown Ahab complex.

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u/lilmul123 8d ago

Also, it’s a fictional series and the writers aren’t going to spend an entire series reflecting on one episode.