O Destino Final das sondas Voyager

[Music] the spacecraft was very far from home, beyond the orbit of the most distant planet and well above the plane of the ecliptic, the imaginary flat surface where the orbits of the planets are confined, the spacecraft was speeding away from the Sun at 60,000 km, but at the beginning of February 1990 was reached by an urgent message from obedient Earth, the ship redirected its cameras to the already distant planets, rotating its scanning platform from one point to another in space, took 60 photographs and stored them in its recorder and then slowly radio transmitted the data back to Earth, when Carl Sean asked them to take a photo of the Earth using the Voyager probe, he knew that that image would have no real scientific value. After all, we have known for a long time that the Earth is just a small speck suspended in the vastness. of space But although we already know this, no one had ever seen our world in this way, he knew that the real value of this image would not be scientific but rather philosophical, he believed that it would help us in the continuous process of understanding our true circumstance and condition, this would also be the first and probably last opportunity in many decades to record an image of Our Home in these conditions and the result of this the pale blue dot the iconic image of planet Earth with a single bluish pixxel resting in a ray of sunlight taught us a great lesson in humility We live on a tiny piece of a small, insignificant, almost imperceptible point in the vastness of [Music] space, the probes are also carrying the Golden disks that contain some information about us, our Culture, our planet and Star system, you may have watched the series the problem of three bodies and now you are imagining the great risk that this feat represents revealing our planet in this way as well as its exact location but the reality is that even in the remote possibility that some of these tiny objects will be found by whoever or whatever somewhere of the galaxy this would take at least several thousand years although the most likely is that the probes will remain wandering for billions of years if they do not collide with anything and do not fall into any gravitational well the idea of ​​sending a disk containing information about the earth along with the Probes were not designed with the intention of some alien civilization finding them in a timely manner so that they could discover us and come to us . entire solar system much easier in this scenario our descendants could find the said probes at a time when our own civilization is something very different than at the time they were launched making them true time capsules offering a true glimpse of a distant past there is one more factor that prevents the voyagers from becoming responsible for triggering an Alien Invasion. Soon they will be completely without energy and will be nothing more than pieces of cold and lifeless metals wandering through space. Today scientists are able to detect them and keep in touch just because they know which direction they are in and because they are still able to keep their antennas facing the earth making it possible to send and receive their signals when their batteries finally run out they will no longer be able to keep their antennas facing us and they will lose the contact will forever remain undetectable to us and to whatever is lurking in the universe, indistinguishable from simple rocks that roam the Cosmos, so the only way to check what is in those disks would be to capture one of the probes that travel at speeds of approximately 60,000 km per hour without completely destroying them in the process may not be difficult for aliens with advanced technology But as I said earlier They will be distinguishable from simple rocks So why would they go to the trouble but is there a limit to how far the Probes can go like will this be the end of them in fact and what would happen if they entered another star system [Music] to understand how they will die we must first understand how they receive energy and to this day, almost 50 years after being launched, they are still active, the Voyager probes were equipped with mhw RTG thermoelectric generators fueled with plutonium 238, which provide all the energy for the probes . and this is when the clock starts counting down on its useful life, each RTG provided around 157 W when new, which means that the Voyager was launched with around 470 W of power, although it is true that the half-life of the 37 kg of pressed spheres, dioxide, of plutonium in each vehicle is 87.7 years. It is not the plutonium that is the limiting factor in the Voyagers’ power supplies. Each RTG produces energy through a series of 312 silicon germanium thermocouples, which convert the 2400 W of thermal energy per generator directly into electrical energy for use by Voyager, however, these thermocouples are exposed directly to the neutron flux from the decay of plutonium and their efficiency decreases long before the plutonium reaches even its first half-life given that 46 years have passed since the launch of the voyagers we can assume that we only lost about 1/4 of the power so the rtgs are still spinning about 1800 w of thermal energy should still be producing over 330 w of power but the radiation affected the thermocouples and the Voyager 1 and 2 now only receive about 220 w of total power, this is barely enough at this point to keep the probe heaters on and still send a paltry 19 w signal to Earth. magnetics are still running currently the rtgs are losing the ability to generate power at a rate of about 4 w per year and soon the power will drop below the minimum required to keep the spacecraft pointing and transmitting at this point the command to finally shut down the Voyager will be sent the spacecraft will be rotated to provide the gyroscopic pointing of the aut gain antenna on earth for as long as possible and then everything except the 40 bits per second engineering data feed will be shut down Probably sometime in the next year or two after Then the autog antenna will lose alignment with the earth and we will lose contact with Voyager forever. Some time after that the computer will go into a PW error state and eventually all systems will shut down and the spacecraft except for heat of the isotopes still active in the rtgs will be dead the rtgs will continue to produce noticeable heat for about 10 half lives or about 870 years after launch Then around 2845 the rtgs will finally cool down and the probes will be completely dormant after the power runs out Sonas will continue to navigate outside the solar system, eventually falling to a heliocentric speed of about 12 km/s over the next few centuries, they will lose an additional 5 km per second due to still escaping the pull of the sun’s gravity over the next few centuries. escape velocity at 100 astronomical units is still 5 km per second which means that the Voyagers still need to climb this Hill in about 20,000 years the Voyagers will reach a distance of one year from the sun by this time they will have practically stabilized at a temperature from 3 to 4 kin the temperature of interstellar space the rum flight It will continue to advance until its first close encounter with gliz 445 in around 40,000 years, currently this star is 17.6 light years from Earth but it is not that Voyager will gain speed instead gliz 445 is racing towards the solar system several dozen times faster than Voyager when it encounters gliz 445 at a distance of 1.6 light years the probe will be about 2.3 light years away from the sun and glies at a distance of about 4 years sunlight about the same distance from the current nearest star the next centauri so we don’t need to worry about glies 445 wreaking havoc on the solar system Voyager 2 on the other hand will pass at about 1.7 light years from the star Ross 248 in 42,000 years it is estimated that this red dwarf will become the closest star to the sun in 30,000 years, just as gliz 445 is also moving towards the solar system and left undisturbed for the next 296,000 years the ship will pass the star Sirius at a distance of 4.3 light years sometime between 50,000 and 880,000 years from now the voyagers will finally leave the realm where the sun dominates the gravity they feel and will be plunged into the local gravity of the Orion arm of the Milky Way galaxy trapped in a Galactocele Orbit once every 200 million years however the probes would need to add almost another 330 km/s of speed to escape the galaxy itself so they will continue to orbit the galactic center for the rest of the foreseeable future or almost so in 4 and a half billion years the Andromeda Galaxy will collide with our Milky Way and there is no way of knowing what will happen to the voyagers when this happens most of the material that forms the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy will remain in the new combined galaxy but some of its content will be ejected via gravitational interactions into intergalactic space. After this point it is impossible to predict anything, eventually dust, High Energy photons and gas hydrogen will begin to wear down the satellite but this process will realistically take billions of years barring a catastrophic impact with a bit of star fragment or being sucked into a gravity well the voyagers will continue to travel until well after the sun burns the earth and turns into a white dwarf , it is entirely likely that the Voyager probes will still travel long after humanity and all the things we have created on earth have long since disappeared. orbit of some of them resemble a muamua the first interstellar visitor we detected the approximately 400 m wide rock had already been drifting in space for millions of years based on its trajectory before crossing our solar system it was closest to the sun on September 9, 2017 and like the Voyagers the asteroid is not bound to the sun like the solar system’s comets and asteroids and is currently heading back into interstellar space this is almost certainly the same way the Voyagers will travel through distant Solar systems they may be captured by some alien race in the very distant future, impossible to know, but if it happens and if they are able to reproduce the contents of the Golden disks, they will know about a small, pale blue dot sitting within a radius of its mother star, a place that has long since ceased to exist. existed in the past called earth, if you have watched this far, I would like to express my gratitude and if you like our content, share it with a friend who also likes astronomy, comment, leave your critical opinion or suggestion and if you are not subscribed, I invite you to subscribe and join to us on our journey Ros comins of the universe This was Horizon Thank you very much and see you next time