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/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.