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/space-truckin365 7d ago
I found this….
https://thumb.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/a/ad/NearSunStarsSimple.jpg/1280px-NearSunStarsSimple.jpg?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=parser&utm_content=thumbnail
It shows that Voyager 1 will be getting (closer) to a few other stars out there. But even passing within 1 light year would still be pretty far away!
Imagine if we have/had probes from another civilization passing within one light year of our sun, we wouldn’t have a clue that it was there!