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It's expected never to encounter any other object in all eternity. Unless of course someone deliberately aims for it. I heard once it will eventually lose it's
by FridayoLeary 11mo ago
It's expected never to encounter any other object in all eternity. Unless of course someone deliberately aims for it. I heard once it will eventually lose it's form entirely and just drift through space as a melted lump of metal. For some reason that reminds me of Red Dwarf.
We are going to lose it before long i wonder if it will be possible to find it on a future date in theory.
- babylon5 11mo agoIt's cold out there, why would it melt?
- DecentShoes 11mo agoRadiation?
- jethronethro 11mo agoHeat ray from a passing flying saucer?
- lmm 11mo agoIt's got a very long time to do so. Like how a bowl of water evaporates at room temperature.
- hdgvhicv 11mo agoIt would ablate due to interstellar hydrogen, but that’s so rare over a billion years you’re taking a few millimetres.
- didacusc 11mo agoNo chance of it ever being hit by anything?
- nomel 11mo ago> It's expected never to encounter any other object in all eternity. This is read as "near zero" rather than "no chance". "Expected" is a word of uncertainty. I think the rough napkin math would be: take the volume that the probe will sweep through and multiply it by the volume of matter in the universe/volume of the universe.
- antod 11mo agoSo a virtual impossiblity? That's a finite improbability rather than an infinite improbability. I think I need a fresh cup of really hot tea.
- nemo44x 11mo agoSpace is well named.
- hdgvhicv 11mo agoYou think it’s a long way down to the shops, but that’s peanuts compared to space.
- nomel 11mo ago> I heard once it will eventually lose it's form entirely It will be sitting at something like -450F. Could it really lose form!? Is the idea that all the phonons could converge to one point, shifting an atom of metal (which will happen infinitely with infinite time)? Maybe with random photons/hydrogen/whatever "continuously" adding energy? Neat.
- Scubabear68 11mo agoFrom what I recall, one of the hazards of long term space travel is that nearly any material will start sublimating atoms in the hard vacuum of space, with things like cosmic rays adding to the woes. Some over time it will start deteriorating. Not sure about “melting” into an amorphous mass, I guess in theory the probes gravity could do that, but I would imagine even the tiniest force would disturb that and dissipate it.
- antonvs 11mo agoOne issue is that over long enough timeframes, even atoms that we consider stable will decay - particularly ones that are heavier than iron, which will decay towards iron or nickel. That decay will eventually compromise the structure of the probes.
- Retric 11mo agoI doubt that’s true. At minimum it’s going to hit an enormous quantity of micrometer sized objects. It’s gravitationally bound to the Milky way so it’s going to keep wandering into and out of star systems for a very long time. We’re talking a large multiple of the age of the universe meanwhile plenty of space rocks show encounters with other space rocks on a vastly smaller timescale. If nothing else it’s got decent odds of being part of the star formation process. Stars are ~10% of the milky way’s mass and star formation is going to continue for a while.
- gerdesj 11mo agoQuite. It will hit the occasional something, eventually. If nothing else it will be mildly bathed in radiation of some sort.
- saulpw 11mo agoSupposing that it does become part of a new star, and some "nearby" civilization had sufficiently precise instruments...would that be a detectable anomaly? Like some atoms of Plutonium still haven't decayed, and isn't that weird that Plutonium's spectral signature is present in this new star? Or is that just something that happens because some plutonium is created in a supernova and might just have been floating around anyway.
- pfdietz 11mo agoIt's going to hit gas that will slowly but inexorably sputter it to nothing.
- bad_haircut72 11mo agoIts gonna prove the closed manifold hypothesis when it shows up coming from the opposite direction in a few hundred million years
- Aboutplants 11mo agoAh, so this is how asteroids are made!
- jacquesm 11mo agoSure, but we're talking insane amounts of time unless it hits something head one. Even the electronics are still alive and in 2024 after a long break we managed to get signals back. It is anybody's guess at this point how long the craft will remain functional but it will take a long, long time (long after humanity will either have destroyed itself or has figured out how to overtake it) before it is 'a melted lump of metal'. Look at the metal that we routinely dig up in the hostile environment known as 'Earth' and which wasn't particularly designed to be long lasting. Voyager is just that: designed to last for a really long time. At a minimum several millennia, though of course by that time the electronics will no longer function, and not because they no longer have power but simply because they have degraded due to their rather more sensitive nature than the rest of the craft.
- nosrepa 11mo agoIt'll come back on its own and want to talk to some whales.