We are going to lose it before long i wonder if it will be possible to find it on a future date in theory.
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.
In 10^40 years it will barely have scratched the surface. Unless protons decay.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.