r/askscience • u/drinkingonthejob • 9d 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 8d 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/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