What Will Voyager One & Two Encounter Next? (4K UHD)

[Music] in the darkness of space billions of miles from home NASA's Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are exploring a region where nothing from Earth has explored before the journey started in 1977 when NASA took advantage of a rare planetary alignment that would allow the Voyager probes to explore the solar system's outer planets the mission was to conduct close-up studies of the gas giants including their large moons and ring systems Voyager 1 was set on a faster more direct path that sent the spacecraft sweeping past Jupiter and Saturn while Voyager 2 took a slightly different path that would also take it past the two gas giants but then on to Uranus and Neptune making it the first and currently only probe to explore the two distant ice giants between them they explored all four of the outer planets their colossal magnetic fields forty-eight of their mysterious moons and their unique ring systems providing scientists with unprecedented data but their mission did not end there because they both went on to achieve another milestone in space exploration in August 2012 Voyager 1 made the historic entry into interstellar space the area between stars then six years later Voyager 2 also crossed the threshold making the twins the only two spacecraft ever to venture into this mysterious region even though the probes are more than 11 billion miles away which is more than 18 billion kilometers away their story is possibly only just beginning because on their current paths both Voyager 1 and 2 will continue to head outwards across the galaxy for eons perhaps even outlasting the Sun although Voyager 1 is predicted to run out of power in 2021 it will continue to escape the solar system at a speed of about 3.5 astronomical units per year in the direction of the constellation Ophiuchus which can be found traveling the celestial equator in our night sky for more than thirty eight thousand two hundred and fifty years the probe will drift through the darkness of interstellar space until it comes within 1.6 light-years of an obscure red dwarf star called Gliese er four four five that can be located in the constellation camelopardalis Kleiza 445 is currently seventeen point six light-years away however the star is rapidly approaching our solar system which means that by the time Voyager 1 passes Gliese ofor 45 the star will only be around 3.45 light-years away making it at the time of the flyby one of the closest stars to the Sun in about 56,000 years from now Voyager 1 may have finally left the solar system as it exits the mysterious Oort cloud a distant giant spherical shell of icy comets like objects that surround the Sun and everything that is gravitationally bound to it the Oort cloud is believed to be so large that it may extend halfway from the Sun to the next closest star then for about five hundred and seventy thousand years Voyager one were likely drift through the darkness of space aimlessly heading towards its next possible encounter another red dwarf star called Gliese a six eight six [Music] Voyager 2 on the other hand is heading in a different direction towards the constellation of Sagittarius and pavo at a speed of about 3.1 astronomical units per year the probe is predicted to run out of power in 2025 where it will then coast through space all alone for around 40,000 years until it comes within 1.7 light-years of a small star called Ross 2 for 8 which can be located in the constellation of Andromeda at this point Ross 248 will briefly be the closest star to the Sun as its path through the galaxy brings it just three light-years away around 20,000 years after this distant flyby Voyager 2 will also go beyond the icy shell of objects known as the Oort cloud the place where the Sun's gravitational influence drops off then just like its twin Voyager 2 will spend hundreds of thousands of years coasting through interstellar space but it won't have to wait as long as Voyager 1 did to encounter its next object because around the Year 298,000 the now ancient spacecraft will pass within 4.3 light years of the colossal star Sirius which is currently the brightest star in the night sky from here for AJ to will drift for another hundred thousand years or so until it eventually passes the star delta path which according to the SETI Institute is one of the best targets among the 100 closest stars to search for habitable planets that may Harbor life beyond our own after all of these extremely distant flybys the twin probes will continue their journey through the galaxy for millions of years passing through all types of different regions the ultimate fate of the Voyager probes is unknown they may eventually collide with a rogue planet be smashed into pieces by micro meteorites be picked up by an extraterrestrial species or perhaps even outlast our solar system altogether surviving long after the Sun has died billions of years from now but one thing is for sure these important and impressive feats of human technology will always be a reminder of an ancient civilization that were capable of producing not one but two probes that explored their solar system and beyond [Music] [Music] you

Channel: V101 Science

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Keywords: Where will Voyager end up, what will voyager see in the future, how long will voyager last, how far is voyager, voyager one, voyager two, outer solar system, interstellar space, Sirius Star, Oort cloud, Heliosheath, NASA, Documentary, Stellar flyby, Gliese, Where are the voyager probes heading, What will voyager encounter, Ridddle

Id: L45iFKOlWMg

Length: 7min 48sec (468 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 01 2020