Soumendra Nath Thakur, Tagore's Electronic Lab, India
March 12, 2025
After crossing the heliopause on August 25, 2012, Voyager 1 entered interstellar space and now travels at approximately 100 astronomical units (AU) from the Sun. However, despite having left the Sun’s immediate influence, this region remains firmly under the gravitational pull of the Milky Way. To put its journey into perspective, the probe would need to traverse another 100,000 AU just to cross the Oort Cloud, the outermost region dominated by the Sun’s gravity. This scale of influence highlights the near impossibility of Voyager 1 experiencing antigravity within its foreseeable trajectory.
For the sake of argument, if the space probe were to experience antigravity at all, it would first need to escape the gravitational influence of the Milky Way. However, even after reaching the edge of our galaxy, it would still be embedded within the immense gravitational field of the Virgo Supercluster, and then the Laniakea Supercluster—a vast structure encompassing about 100,000 galaxies and spanning 520 million light-years, of which the Milky Way is merely a part.
True antigravity, as evidenced in the large-scale dynamics of cosmic structures and referenced in research by A. D. Chernin et al., manifests in regions where the repulsive effects of dark energy dominate over gravitational attraction. However, such effects become significant only on intergalactic and inter-supercluster scales, far beyond the Laniakea Supercluster’s boundary.
Therefore, it is certain that Voyager 1 will never experience true antigravity unless, by some extraordinary and uncontrollable gravitational event, it receives enough assistance from galaxies at the very edge of Laniakea to escape the supercluster’s total gravitational influence—a journey requiring millions of light-years of travel.
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