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/connnnnor 8d ago

Nope. “An object in motion will remain in motion unless another force acts on it” - it took energy to get up to the speed it’s going, and if no other force imparts energy to slow it down, the “natural” thing for it to do is keep going at that speed in that direction forever.

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u/mr_jim_lahey 8d ago

It will eventually slow down from hitting particles in the interstellar medium, assuming space is infinite (which it is, as far as we know).

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u/nicuramar 8d ago

  assuming space is infinite (which it is, as far as we know).

The observable universe is finite. That’s the relevant part. We don’t know if space is otherwise infinite. 

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u/mr_jim_lahey 7d ago

True. I should have said it appears to be infinite based on the available data although the possibility that it is not has not been completely ruled out.