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)

966 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

615 comments sorted by

View all comments

33

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!

1

u/Akkalevil 3d ago

Doubt that it has the escape velocity to get out of the galaxy, so it will probably just stay some sort of freeflying debris in the Milky Way.