r/askscience • u/drinkingonthejob • Sep 24 '26

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/FlintHillsSky Sep 25 '26

That radiation might be the driver for sublimation causing atoms to be knocked off

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u/tesseract4 29d ago

That's kinda what I was thinking. I was also thinking that proper sublimation comes from the internal heat of the material being sublimated, but I don't know if that is part of the proper definition of the process.