Comment by Retric
16 days ago
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.
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.
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.
“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.
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
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It's going to hit gas that will slowly but inexorably sputter it to nothing.
'Slowly' is doing a lot of work there. We're talking about very large amounts of time.
Like 10^200 years
In 10^40 years it will barely have scratched the surface. Unless protons decay.
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Quite. It will hit the occasional something, eventually. If nothing else it will be mildly bathed in radiation of some sort.
Space is mostly empty
So are the core of stars, “mostly empty” of matter isn’t specific enough to do calculations.