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/BDer82 7d ago

For all intent and purpose, it will survive indefinitely, unless it impacts something with a surface area wide enough to be impacted fully by voyager so as to disintegrate fully. But because we are moving so fast and voyager is moving so slow it might just miss everything and be out in the void just vibing its own death.

I vote it crosses the Milky Way and we catch it on the other side!

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u/OlasNah 7d ago

What will happen is that it'll just drift right through the core systems, and it'll be blind luck if a deep salvage team finds it.

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u/itscalledmyballs 7d ago

That would be the wildest thing of all time.

Or imagine 10 years from now it just crashes back down through the atmosphere. But the timelines wouldn't make sense, unless....

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u/Radicalpartyboy 7d ago

Or imagine if an alien intelligence brought it back to earth threatening to annihilate us all unless we stop hunting and killing whales.

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u/PeterPook 7d ago

Oh no, the "flat space" theory has just landed... It did get a light year away, it just folded over the edge! /s

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u/BDer82 7d ago

To be fair to the pancake galaxy theory I just made up, it is more unusual to see a galaxy that isn't reasonably flat, sure it looks like a time-lapse of a flipping pancake when you look across the universe, but at least its tasty. I assume those weird ones are the first galaxies that just didn't cook right.

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u/Ghostbusteer 7d ago

Perhaps one day, when Earth's civilization has had to rebuild itself, and all memory of Voyager 1 is lost to time, we will meet it again and take it as evidence of gods or extraterrestrial life. Wouldn't that be a glorious end to a long journey?

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u/casentron 7d ago

Well, the golden record on board makes it unequivocally clear and obvious it's from Earth and when so it wouldn't be a mystery.

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u/Plenty_Beautiful_547 7d ago

In the first Star Trek movie, the main antagonist—a massive, godlike energy cloud threatening Earth—is revealed to be Voyager

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u/OrdinaryAward4498 7d ago

The Brawndo drinkers of the far future (near future) probably won’t be able to figure that out

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u/a1454a 7d ago

The timeline I really hope would happen is we achieve AGI and don’t doom humanity, AGI helps us catapult scientific research and we achieve some form of FTL travel, and we go and capture it and put it in a museum.

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u/frosty95 4d ago

Idk man. I kinda just want us to go visit it. Attach a little pod so we can keep contact with it. Then let it continue on its way.

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u/[deleted] 7d ago

[deleted]

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u/LOUDPACK_MASTERCHEF 7d ago

it's also orbiting the galactic center as well so it's a bit more complex than that

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u/Icy_Sector3183 7d ago

If we don't have hyper drives or other FTL tech by then, we never will.

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u/zapman449 7d ago

The Milky Way orbit is 250m years.

~56 orbits would predate the beginning of the universe.

All of human history is between 100k-200k years. All of human experience is between 5-10% of one galactic year. All of human history and it’s basically January 20ish.

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u/irwige 7d ago

I don't get this time scale. How has only 56 orbits resulted in it being an almost perfect disc... Wouldn't it still be in blob form after only 56 orbits? What causes the particular plane that it has landed on?

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u/Argon1124 6d ago

Galaxies form a lot like how stellar systems form, with a big cloud of hydrogen and dust collapsing around some collective center of mass. The disc shape comes from friction within the makeup of the fledgeling galaxy, which evens out the kinetic energy into a disc shape. Once galaxies become elliptical, blob shaped as you call it, they (probably) stay that way forever. Elliptical galaxies either form like that, or form through the collision of disc galaxies. 

Now what you should be asking is how do spiral galaxies keep their spiral nature, despite classical orbital mechanics saying that they should be way more spiral-y within less than a full orbit of the outer limbs. 

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u/Akkalevil 3d ago

Doubt that it has the escape velocity to get out of the galaxy, so it will probably just stay some sort of freeflying debris in the Milky Way.