Within a billion years, NASA’s Voyager 1 probe will have made it to the opposite side of the Milky Way disk relative to the Sun. By the time it arrives, the Sun will have boiled off all the oceans on Earth, making it inhabitable. As a result, NASA might not be around to celebrate this remarkable milestone in the journey of one of its most iconic spacecraft.
Last month, I asked my brilliant undergraduate student at Harvard, Shokhruz Kakharov where the Voyager 1 spacecraft will be in a billion years. By using a detailed model for the mass distribution of the Milky Way galaxy, Shokhruz was able to plot the future orbit of Voyager relative to the Sun over billions of years. The results will be featured in a forthcoming peer-reviewed paper.
