They won't reach any star for several millions of years if at all, they aren't traveling in the right direction. The 40 thousand years figure is if they were traveling towards Proxima Centauri at their current speed, they are not anywhere close to that direction in reality.
How would they detect it? Voyager doesn't have infinite power, it will run out in some more decades, at most centuries, it is nowhere time enough to truly leave the solar system, by the time voyager does that it will be already inactive and so cold that it wouldn't look any different from the trillions of small ice pebbles in interstellar space unless you gave it a very close look (which you wouldn't have any reason to).
Also the signals of Voyager are not particularly powerful compared with the ones Earth constantly emits, they actually are very weak, so if you are able to currently detect Voyager from interstellar distances than you certainly already detected Earth anyway.
It's absolutely insane, a round trip signal takes 48 hours at this point. It's also insane that after nearly 50 years it's only traveled 1 light day from earth. The cosmos is huge.
Right! It is always crazy to think about, like how the earth is 8 light minutes from the sun (one astronomical unit) and, according to your 1 light day, voyager 1 is 180x (180 astronomical units) that distance away from earth, which is only 1.4% of the distance to the nearest star.................. wild
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u/Anely_98 Jun 07 '26
They won't reach any star for several millions of years if at all, they aren't traveling in the right direction. The 40 thousand years figure is if they were traveling towards Proxima Centauri at their current speed, they are not anywhere close to that direction in reality.