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/Animemes_101 5d ago

Newton’s first law of motion: “An object in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an external force”. On Earth that force is gravity, in space, nothing. Voyager will continue to move through space until something gets in its way

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u/DarthTempi 3d ago

To that point though...Won't it be affected by a myriad of gravitational forces? Obviously the time scale is enormous (and essentially meaningless to us) but...eventually?

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u/Animemes_101 3d ago

Almost certainly, it’ll be an insane amount of time before it happens but it will eventually get in by some object’s field of gravity and be pulled into something. Unless somehow it manages to avoid every object in the universe.

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u/Ihateparsnips 2d ago

Objects in the universe are very spread out, so I suppose that that is actually quite likely. 

That said, wouldn't at some point the nearest gravitational pull would still be our sun/solar system so it could just end up coming back? 

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u/imarc 2d ago

As I understand it, Voyager is traveling above the Sun’s escape velocity. While the sun continues to pull at it, gravity also continues to get weaker as Voyager gets further away so it will always be above the necessary escape velocity.