How do we receive anything at all from Voyager? Isn’t our solar system hundreds of thousands of miles away from where it was when we launched Voyager? Does Voyager move relative to the movement of our solar system? Like, is it constantly slipping sideways in addition to moving away from us because of our movement when we launched it?
I’m not sure that’s how inertia works in space. No matter what, unless there are forces acting on it outside of the solar system, voyager will always be moving at whatever its sum of speed changes are relative to how fast and in what direction earth was moving when it launched.
Dropping something outside of a major gravity well like earth or the solar system doesn’t make it magically adjust to the much larger context, it just stops being drawn so much to that well.
This is because smaller contexts like earth’s pull exist inside unfathomably larger contexts like galactic pull. That context was already accounted for by default at launch and doesn’t change when the spacecraft leaves the influence of earth or the sun.
That being said, a lightyear is an incredible distance that the voyager has only traveled a fraction of, hence why we can still communicate with it.
Whne you jump on a train do you ‘slip’ backwards, because the train moved under you? No, you don’t. Why? Because you have inertia. When you jump you don’t magically come to a halt, you continue moving at the same speed as the train, so you don’t move realtive to it. It’s the same with Voyager. It didn’t come to a halt when we launched it, it moves at the same speed as our solar system and thus doesn’t ‘slip away’.
By slip sideways, I actually meant “move with us, in the direction the solar system is moving”. Relativity, I guess. So I was asking if it does what you explained it does. Thank you.
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