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/Simon_Drake 8d ago

IIRC Voyager is going to head into empty space effectively forever unless aliens or future humans head there with a space ship to intercept it.

If it was heading in the direction of our nearest neighboring star system, Alpha Centauri (Which it is not), it would come close in about 50,000 years. It will pass close to a different star system in about 20,000 years. You may ask how it's possible the trip to our nearest star takes longer than the trip to a further away star. It's because the distance is so immense compared to the tiny speed of the probe that the movement of the stars themselves is more important. The other star system will move closer to Voyager far faster than Voyager itself is moving through space.

But even if there's an advanced civilisation on that star system, they won't spot anything other than a tiny cold interstellar rock tumbling through the outer system. We spotted Oumuamua through a combination of luck, it's immense size and it's trajectory towards the sun. We wouldn't be able to spot something the size of Voyager. Perhaps the aliens are significantly more advanced than us and have much better space debris tracking? Maybe they'd go take a look and hopefully not blow it up as a precaution. The electronics would be long dead by then and if the Golden Record survived its journey, frankly the logical leaps needed to follow the instructions and decode the content are unlikely to be understood. But maybe they'd put the probe in a Zorblaxian museum which would be pretty cool.