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Future stellar flybys of Voyager + Pioneer


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Using the Gaia dataset, Bailer-Jones and Farnocchia integrated the trajectories of these stars and the Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft to find the closest encounters in the next million years.

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The authors found about 60 stars the spacecraft will approach over the next million years. Of those, they’ll come within 2 parsecs of about 10. The top five closest and most interesting encounters are outlined in a table, including binary systems and two separate visits to Ross 248 (Voyager 2 and Pioneer 10) about 8,000 years apart.

All four spacecraft will also visit Earth’s nearest neighbor, Proxima Centauri, but none will arrive for at least 16,000 years, and none will fly nearer than about a parsec. That’s a long time—though not by the study’s standards—and not a particularly close encounter.

Voyager 2’s closest stellar encounter will be 0.5 parsecs roughly 40,000 years from now. Voyager 1 and the two Pioneer spacecraft will have much closer approaches at 0.2–0.3 parsecs, but they’ll take longer to get there—around 90,000 years (Pioneer 10), 300,000 years (Voyager 1), and 930,000 years (Pioneer 11).

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Future stellar flybys of the Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft

Coryn A.L. Bailer-Jones1and Davide Farnocchia21Max Planck Institute for Astronomy, K ̈onigstuhl 17, 69117 Heidelberg, Germany2Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology, 4800 Oak Grove Drive, Pasadena, CA 91109, USA

CONCLUSIONS: We have identified stars from GDR2 that the Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 spacecraft will pass within 0.2–0.3 pcin the next million years. Voyager 2’s closest approach is much sooner (40 kyr), but at a larger separation (0.5 pc). Statistically, a spacecraft will encounter stars within a given distance at approximately the same rate as the Sun does,which Bailer-Jones et al. (2018b) inferred to be one star within 1 pc every 50 kyr. This inferred rate is an extrapolation from the GDR2 data and so predicts many more stars than found here, because most stars do not have the necessary six-dimensional phase space data in GDR2. This rate scales quadratically with encounter distance (i.e. one star within0.1 pc every 5 Myr). As the spacecraft are not leaving the Galaxy, it is inevitable that the spacecraft will pass much closer to some stars on longer timescales than found here. These stars cannot yet be identified because of the limiting magnitude (and thus distance horizon) of the available data. Future data releases from Gaia and other surveys that provide radial velocities for more – especially fainter – stars could reveal specific, closer flybys. The timescale for the collision of a spacecraft with a star is of order 1020  

years, so the spacecraft have a long future ahead of them.

The Study

 

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52 minutes ago, toast said:

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Well I hope they make it and still have the ability to transmit data they recover. 

Peace

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22 minutes ago, Manwon Lender said:

Well I hope they make it and still have the ability to transmit data they recover. 

Peace

Sadly they won't. Even if we assume the radio could work that long, the Plutonium-238 that powers the space crafts have a half life of 87,7 years so by the time they reach any stars they will have essentially no power left.

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