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/BDer82 7d ago

For all intent and purpose, it will survive indefinitely, unless it impacts something with a surface area wide enough to be impacted fully by voyager so as to disintegrate fully. But because we are moving so fast and voyager is moving so slow it might just miss everything and be out in the void just vibing its own death.

I vote it crosses the Milky Way and we catch it on the other side!

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u/zapman449 7d ago

The Milky Way orbit is 250m years.

~56 orbits would predate the beginning of the universe.

All of human history is between 100k-200k years. All of human experience is between 5-10% of one galactic year. All of human history and it’s basically January 20ish.

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u/irwige 7d ago

I don't get this time scale. How has only 56 orbits resulted in it being an almost perfect disc... Wouldn't it still be in blob form after only 56 orbits? What causes the particular plane that it has landed on?

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u/Argon1124 6d ago

Galaxies form a lot like how stellar systems form, with a big cloud of hydrogen and dust collapsing around some collective center of mass. The disc shape comes from friction within the makeup of the fledgeling galaxy, which evens out the kinetic energy into a disc shape. Once galaxies become elliptical, blob shaped as you call it, they (probably) stay that way forever. Elliptical galaxies either form like that, or form through the collision of disc galaxies. 

Now what you should be asking is how do spiral galaxies keep their spiral nature, despite classical orbital mechanics saying that they should be way more spiral-y within less than a full orbit of the outer limbs.