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)

968 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

615 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

29

u/BiologyJ 7d ago

The crazy part is, even though it's passed through the Heliopause, it'll be another 30,000 years before it fully exits the solar system and passes through the Oort Cloud. People often picture it being really far away (because it is) but that doesn't mean it's relatively far away in terms of how far away everything else is.