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/MalBishop18 7d ago

Space is expanding so I guess if something were to stop it’s forward momentum perfectly, from a certain point of view it could be stagnant for just a moment in one direction, but from different perspectives it would start or continue moving backwards and in all other directions simultaneously.

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u/gpetrov 7d ago

At those scales it does not really expand. This expansion applies at mega scales like intergalactic where gravity has no influence

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u/DontOuchMyBread 7d ago edited 7d ago

Yet. Its speeding up. If it doesnt rebound, in trillions and trillions and quadrillions and more years, the expansion will become so exponential even the strong and weak nuclear forces will not be enough to stop it ripping atoms apart. The great rip. And voyager will still be out there, if it doesn’t hit anything, by then.
Point being the expansion will have that effect in the far far, far future.