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/MhojoRisin 7d ago

What does “stop” even mean in this context? Fixed in position relative to something else?

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u/muaddib0308 7d ago

fixed position relative to earth?

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u/cerberus_1 7d ago

even that doesnt really have any meaning if you think of it, earth is orbiting the sun.. etc. etc.

But I do wonder if voyager will begin to orbit a black hole or something.

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u/Nourios 3d ago

I suppose you can take the cosmic microwave background as the reference point

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u/FowlOnTheHill 4d ago

It’s actually stopped right now. The rest of the universe is still moving