Whenever we prepare for a trip, we try to know how long it will take. Imagine if we talk about traveling the entire galaxy.
The Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, which were launched in the 1970s, are leaving the solar system. But what will become of them? Will they reach other star systems? And if so, how long will it take? Although they are unmanned space probes already launched by NASA, these figures can give us an idea of how long it could take humanity to get out of the reach of the solar system.
Precisely a couple of physicists, from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at CIT, have discovered a way to estimate the time it would take for a spacecraft like this to find its way to other star systems.
Using astrometric and radial velocity data from the Gaia observatory, the researchers integrated the trajectories of 7.4 million stars, and spacecraft, through a galactic potential, to identify those stars to which the spacecraft will pass closest. . The most up-to-date map of Gaia has the locations of some 7.2 million stars. They combined that data with the projected paths of the Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes, launched between 1972 and 1977.
The conclusion was a bit daunting
It could take tens of thousands of years before one of these probes approaches another star system, and several million million years before there is direct contact.
“The timescale for a spacecraft colliding with a star is on the order of 10 ^ 20 [one hundred quintillion] years, so the spacecraft has a long future ahead of it,” the experts write.
Thus, the physicists discovered that the four spacecraft will approach approximately 60 stars over the course of the next million years, and will be within two parsecs with approximately 10 of them. They also discovered that Pioneer 10 is likely the first to pass through a star system, one called HIP 117795. It is located in the constellation Cassiopeia. Their calculations show that the spacecraft will pass within 0.231 parsecs of the star in about 90,000 years. A reasonable distance (in cosmic terms).
To put it in perspective, Pluto’s orbit takes it more than 7 billion kilometers. Therefore, our probes will be tens of thousands of times that distance from alien stars.
In general, before they collide or are captured by a star system, spacecraft could be traveling about 1020 years .
Gaia was launched by the European Space Agency in 2013 and stationed at a point just outside of Earth’s orbit around the sun. Since then, it has been collecting information on a billion stars, including their paths through space.
Future space missions don’t have to follow the path of these four probes, of course: our closest star system, Alpha Centauri, is only 4.37 light years or 1.34 parsecs away. At its current speed, Voyager 1 could get there in less than 80,000 years. Although until scientists figure out how to develop a curvature motor like the one in Star Trek to move faster than the speed of light, we have a long wait.
Referencia: Coryn A. L. Bailer-Jones et al. Future Stellar Flybys of the Voyager and Pioneer Spacecraft, Research Notes of the AAS (2019). DOI: 10.3847/2515-5172/ab158e
Future stellar flybys of the Voyager and Pioneer spacecraft, arXiv:1912.03503 [astro-ph.EP] arxiv.org/abs/1912.03503
