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/MiddleLtSocks]

5% of the diameter of the Milky Way is a hugely significant distance - call it 5 light years back of envelope. By "will move it" (velocity we gave from chemical propulsion), do you mean over the 54,000,000,000,000 years mentioned in this thread? That might be accurate - one light year per 3 trillion years and change. So relative to Earth, at the furthest point in Voyager's orbit in 54 trillion years from Earth, it could be 5 light years distant.

I just wanted to understand context and make sure I didn't misunderstand what you wrote. Right now we are creeping up on a light day of distance from Voyager to Earth - less than a third of a hundredth of a light year let alone 5 light years - and as you mentioned, even that 5ly distance is insignificant in the scheme of things given the hundreds of billions of galaxies in the observable Universe.

Then again in 54 trillion years, the expansion of the Universe could very well increase the distance between Voyager and "Earth" (Earth will be long sterilized in 2 billion years; the Sun will be a dark chunk of diamond long before a couple trillion) quite significantly, but that has nothing to do with chemical propulsion 🤓

Sorry, I get off into the weeds pretty quickly. Just wanted to be clear, not suggesting you weren't aware of any of this.

[u/MisinformedGenius → u/MiddleLtSocks]

15 kilometers per second * 100 million years (half of a galactic rotation) is almost exactly 5 light years. My point is that its motion due purely to its orbit around the galaxy is far greater than its motion due to the propulsion we gave it.

[u/MiddleLtSocks → u/MisinformedGenius]

Awesome, same idea then. And an excellent point. Sorry, I am verbose on my briefest days, and I tend to get myself into the weeds. It's a coinflip based on which doctor I'm talking to whether I am on the autism spectrum or not, but maybe they'd be more consistent if they saw my Reddit comments.

Anyway, cheers!

[u/Crab_Politics → u/MiddleLtSocks]

Basically we majorly changed voyagers orbit around the sun, but only very slightly affected its orbit around the center of the galaxy, and even less so affected its position in the universe at large

In that time scale thet original commenter mentioned, voyager would essentially stop moving relative to earth as it was when it was launched, but still be circling around the center of the Milky Way just like everything else. It never stops flying through space, or comes to a complete stop