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"Every direction" isn't what you think it is. Even if we had a voyager travelling the "opposite" direction, once outside the solar system they'd appear to be t
by xnorswap 3y ago
"Every direction" isn't what you think it is.
Even if we had a voyager travelling the "opposite" direction, once outside the solar system they'd appear to be travelling at almost the same speed with respect to the orbit of the solar system around the milky way.
The solar system is estimated to orbit ~200km/sec around the centre of the milky way.
Even with a perfect ejection, at the estimated speed of Voyager you'd end up with one probe going ~180km and the other ~220km, which isn't a huge difference.
And that's without the fact that getting Voyager to that speed required some unique planetary alignment.
- daynthelife 3y agoOn a related note, starting from a circular orbit, it takes 1/(2sqrt(2) - 3) ~ 5.83 times more energy to throw an object to the center of a gravity well than it does to throw it out of orbit. It doesn’t matter how close your initial orbit it, or whether you’re orbiting around the Sun or Sagittarius A*. The ratio is always the same, though gravitational assistance from other bodies often affects the calculations in practice. I expect we’d send a satellite outside the Milky Way long before we get one anywhere near the center of the galaxy. Not that either mission seems particularly feasible with current technology.
- paulddraper 3y agoDoing a % comparison makes little sense. Everything in this arm of the Milky Way is moving along with us. The key metric is that their locations would spread by ~40km/sec. Whether that is an interesting amount of distance in an interesting amount of time is debatable, but that's the number.