So he and his co-author began by tracing the Voyagers' journeys to date and projecting their trajectories out into the future.īut don't get excited for any upcoming milestones. "Our original goal was to determine with a very high precision which stars the Voyagers might one day closely encounter using the at the time newly released Gaia catalog of stars," Oberg said during his presentation. The new research was inspired by the release of the second batch of data from the European Space Agency's spacecraft Gaia, which specializes in mapping more than a billion stars super precisely. Unsurprisingly, the duo's research ambitions didn't start out quite so vast. Related: The Golden Record in pictures: Voyager probes' message to space explained
The result is a forecast that stretches beyond not just humanity's likely extinction, but also beyond the collision of the Milky Way with the neighboring Andromeda galaxy - beyond even the extinction of most stars. Oberg and his colleague combined tracking the Voyagers' trajectories forward with studying the environments the spacecraft will fly through to estimate the odds of the Golden Records surviving their adventures while remaining legible. They continue to send signals back to Earth, updating humans about their adventures far beyond the planets, although those bulletins may cease in a few years, as the spacecraft are both running low on power. Now, the two spacecraft are chugging through the vast outer reaches of the solar system. In 2012, Voyager 1 passed through the heliopause that marks the edge of the sun's solar wind and entered interstellar space in 2018, Voyager 2 did so as well.
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