Where is Voyager 1 and how far can it go?

a reply to: Auricom

It has to collide with Tan-ru first, then rebuild itself as Nomad.

Forgot to address the "how far can it go" question: providing that it doesn't collide with anything or doesn't get captured into an orbit around some massive object, it will carry on coasting through the vacuum of space forever, because there's nothing to stop it.

Now for where it is in the night sky: "Voyager 1 is speeding away from the Sun at a velocity of about 3.50 AU/year toward a point in the sky of RA= 262 degrees, Dec=+12 degrees (35.55 degrees ecliptic latitude, 260.78 degrees ecliptic longitude)." nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov...
This translates to "17 28 00.25 +12 00 00.0" in the usual celestial coordinates, which is in the constellation Ophiuchus.

Here's the location at Sky-Map.org

to answer a lot of your questions, go to NASA's web site about the Voyager probes : voyager.jpl.nasa.gov...

a reply to: Bedlam

Naturally! In the mean time, I'm sitting here waiting for ole Cochrane to get his thumb out his rear and build that darn warp drive.

originally posted by: Mogget
Please be aware that the diagram posted above is not to scale. Alpha Centauri is (very) approximately 270000 times further from the Sun than Earth is!

To be honest, I'm not sure that anything I see in relation to the vastness of space can put it into a true perspective for me. It's difficult to truly imagine. But what that image did do what creat "a" perspective. It may not have been to scale, but it showed me something. I can only ever wish and wonder the amazing space of space.

Just wanted to thank you all for your contributions. I increased my knowledge of Voyager 1...and that's all I was hoping for.

Peace,
Joe

originally posted by: Cloudbuster
...what the heck is the termination shock part. And is there a terminal shock layer around our solar system like a ball . sorry I a bit ignoramus sometimes.

I posted this before in the past, but it's relevant to this thread...

A few years ago, I came across this great explanation of the termination shock at the edge of the solar system, equating it to running water in a sink basin (the water in the sink being moving particles of the solar wind). When the solar wind reaches a minimum speed, a shock wave is created between where it has enough energy to propagate and where the speed is insufficient (it does not just "slow down and fade away").

The same thing can be seen in a sink. Imagine that where the water from the spigot stream meets the sink basin is the Sun, and the water flowing across the basin is the solar wind emanating from the Sun:

The shock arises because solar wind particles are emitted from stars at about 400 km/s, while the speed of sound (in the interstellar medium) is about 100 km/s. (The exact speed depends on the density, which fluctuates considerably.) The interstellar medium, although very low in density, nonetheless has a constant pressure associated with it; the pressure from the solar wind decreases with the square of the distance from the star. As one moves far enough away from the star, the pressure from the interstellar medium becomes sufficient to slow the solar wind down to below its speed of sound; this causes a shock wave.

Other termination shocks can be seen in terrestrial systems; perhaps the easiest may be seen by simply running a water tap into a sink creating a hydraulic jump. Upon hitting the floor of the sink, the flowing water spreads out at a speed that is higher than the local wave speed, forming a disk of shallow, rapidly diverging flow (analogous to the tenuous, supersonic solar wind). Around the periphery of the disk, a shock front or wall of water forms; outside the shock front, the water moves slower than the local wave speed (analogous to the subsonic interstellar medium).

Source: Wikipedia Article on the Heliosphere