[FridayoLeary]

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.

[bad_haircut72]

Its gonna prove the closed manifold hypothesis when it shows up coming from the opposite direction in a few hundred million years

[Retric]

I 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.

[saulpw]

Supposing 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.

[hdgvhicv]

Based on the interstellar density it will take a billion years to ablate just a millimetre off its outer layer.

The chance of impacting anything larger than that is internal, same as an encounter with another star. In 40,000 years it will get to within 1.6 light years from a star, that’s such an unimaginable distance it’s irrelevant.

In 100 million to 1 billion years you may not be able to recover audio from the golden record, but until that point they will be lasting remnants of a civilisation long gone, and never be encountered.

Voyagers will only impact a few thousand kilograms of material before all stars die out in 10^14 years, it will still be an object after the final stars fade.

The biggest risk to voyager now is if proton decay is a thing, or if a civilisation deliberately seeks it out, which seems very unlikely given how many natural lumps of iron int he 1 ton range flying through interstellar space.

[Retric]

“In 40,000 years it will get to within 1.6 light years from a star, that’s such an unimaginable distance it’s irrelevant.”

On most human timescales that’s a long time, but here it’s only 0.004% of a billion years and in general stars are ~5 light years between closest stars in our neighborhood. If you assume zero significant impacts means it’s around in 100+ billion years there will be many vastly closer passes than 1.6 lightyears. It’s the kind of thing you really need to simulate because gravity plays a larger role the closer voyager gets to another star.

[hdgvhicv]

Not at light years. How many non-binary stars do we see colliding with other stars. They don’t. Even when andromeda runs into the Milky Way it won’t result in stars colliding. The chance of the sun colliding with another sun is somewhere in the 10^30 range.

Voyager may end up in a solar system briefly as a high speed extra solar object like Oumuamua, but the chance of it being close enough to suffer any physical affect would be small - think how small a target that would be and how rare stars are. To get within 1 light day would mean passing 100,000 stars within one light year. To get down to earth distance is something like 4 billion passes within a 1 light year distance.

Now sure predicting the future beyond say 100 billion years is tricky, and not something you could simulate, but for all intents and purposes the voyagers will continue long after Earth has died. It (and other craft on escape trajectories like new horizons and pioneers) will be the last remnants of human civilisation

[Retric]

Stars hitting stars isn’t the metric a baseball sized object clearly counts as a meaningful collision at these speeds. Add up all objects in terms of 2d cross sections and it’s the small stuff we’re going to care about, but getting near stars matters because from what we can tell there’s so much more small stuff near stars. The Oort Cloud sits 0.03 to 0.08 light years from the sun etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud ~5 earth masses in vastly smaller objects is a lot of targets. (I recalled an earlier and far larger estimate but it’s still a lot of material.)

Ignoring gravity may be fine at 1.6 light years but a closer approach to even just say 2 light months means spending thousands of years much closer to the star which would matter here. So simple extrapolation based on random distribution of nearest approaches like you just proposed with that 100,000 star calculation is heavily biased in the wrong direction.

[pfdietz]

It's going to hit gas that will slowly but inexorably sputter it to nothing.

[jacquesm]

'Slowly' is doing a lot of work there. We're talking about very large amounts of time.

[hdgvhicv]

Like 10^200 years

In 10^40 years it will barely have scratched the surface. Unless protons decay.

[pfdietz]

Estimates for sputtering of dust grains are much faster than this.

Granted, there is also growth of dust grains. But surfaces from which atoms can be ejected by UV photons will erode.

Some notes: https://www.astro.princeton.edu/~draine/dust/Draine_IPMU_Lec...

[jacquesm]

I'm imagining the sun going nova and the Voyagers surfing on that wave...

[hdgvhicv]

Voyage is travelling about 1 light year per 22,000 years.

That’s really fast on cosmic scales. If it left when the dinosaurs were wiped out it would be 3,000 light years away by now. Even if it left as late as when humans arrived in North America it would be a light year away.

[rkomorn]

I wonder where (and in what state) they'll be by then.

[pfdietz]

The Sun will not go nova.

[gerdesj]

Quite. It will hit the occasional something, eventually. If nothing else it will be mildly bathed in radiation of some sort.

[chistev]

Space is mostly empty

[Retric]

So are the core of stars, “mostly empty” of matter isn’t specific enough to do calculations.

[jacquesm]

Sure, 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.

[nomel]

> 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.

[antonvs]

One 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.

[Scubabear68]

From 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.

[babylon5]

It's cold out there, why would it melt?

[hdgvhicv]

It would ablate due to interstellar hydrogen, but that’s so rare over a billion years you’re taking a few millimetres.

[lmm]

It's got a very long time to do so. Like how a bowl of water evaporates at room temperature.

[jethronethro]

Heat ray from a passing flying saucer?

[DecentShoes]

Radiation?

[nosrepa]

It'll come back on its own and want to talk to some whales.

[didacusc]

No chance of it ever being hit by anything?

[nomel]

> 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]

So 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]

Space is well named.

[hdgvhicv]

You think it’s a long way down to the shops, but that’s peanuts compared to space.

[Aboutplants]

Ah, so this is how asteroids are made!