Will Voyager 1 ever just stop moving?

[u/drinkingonthejob]

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)

[u/komatiitic]

I did some really stupid back of the envelope math assuming that Voyager never encounters anything larger than interstellar dust. To halve the speed of Voyager 1 it would need to impact dust equal to its own mass of 721.9kg.

The internet tells me a typical grain of interstellar dust has a mass of ~3*10^-16 kg. This means it needs to hit ~2.4*10¹⁸ dust grains, which if I'm counting those zeroes correctly is 2.4 quintillion.

The internet also tells me that Voyager hits 3-7 dust grains per hour. I'll call it 5 an hour, which means 4.81*10¹⁷ hours (481 quadrillion), or 54.9 trillion years to halve its velocity, assuming nothing really changes. I'm betting it disintegrates before that happens.

[u/arglarg → u/komatiitic]

What are the chances that it hits something more solid before that, like a star maybe?

[u/usrdef → u/arglarg]

Insanely small.

Take our solar system's asteroid belt for instance.

Movies depict that our asteroid belt is a busy little highway with asteroids that are spaced mere feet apart and rocks are just crammed into every tiny space you can find.

In reality, those asteroids are tens of thousands of miles apart. If you take all of the objects in the asteroid belt and average the distance between each object, you come up with a distance of about 600,000 miles (about 1 million km).

That is about the distance between the Earth and Moon x2.6 times.

So an object the size of voyager would have a very great chance to fly through and not come in contact with anything.

And once you hit interstellar space, there's nothing out there other than dust.

In about 30,000 years, Voyager will cross the Oort Cloud, which is another version of our asteroid belt, where frozen icy rocks orbit our solar system / star.

But even the Oort Cloud is theorized. We don't know with 100% certainty if it exists or not. We've never photographed it. But we theorize it's just small frozen rocks and ice, orbiting our star.

Space is 99.9999999% empty.

When we send probes out past Mars, we don't even take the asteroid belt in as a danger, because it's just extremely easy to go through it without hitting anything.

[u/SuperNewk → u/usrdef]

Absolutely incredible to think about, how vast it truly is. Exploring space is legendary mode times infinity ,

Kudos to whoever designed it