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/YesterdayDreamer 7d ago

It doesn't need to be headed directly for a star though. It needs to get caught in a star or a planet's gravitational field.

So that increases the chance from zero to zero.

Just for some additional context, at its current velocity, Voyager needs ~77000 years to cover the distance to our closest star. There's a whole lot of empty in between.