the Voyager probes have traveled almost as far away as light does in a day. How come they never got hit by anything?
In: 1269
“Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to space.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
And that’s the reason. The distances between objects in space is really big. It’s called space for a reason. There’s a lot of it. You could fly through the asteroid belt with your eyes closed and you’d be the unluckiest person in history to hit anything.
For the big objects like planets, well, they were purposefully going near those and so that was taken into account, especially since they were using those planets for gravity assisted slingshots to gain speed.
Now, like, they would have been hit by really small things but nothing big enough to cause any issues.
Because space is massive and the distance between objects, especially the further away from our relative point near the center of the solar system towards outer space you go, the further away objects are from each other.
I’m not sure if the voyagers haven’t been hit by minor, teeny-tiny particles. But as far as large objects we could detect, they’re just super far away from each other making it easy to calculate pathways to navigate round them, especially given that the chances of hitting something the further out you go gets lower.
They get hit all the time! Millions of protons every minute. And the occasional hydrogen or helium atom. Rarer still a piece of dust floating through space.
But anything larger than that is so rare out there, it would actually be weirded if they *did* hit something that significantly damaged them.
They’ll probably coast without damage for thousands of years, maybe even millions.
Space is so incredibly huge and empty that it’s just not worth even worrying about. It’s spectacularly unlikely you’d hit anything.
Imagine the asteroid belt, often drawn [something like this](https://www.astronomytrek.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/asteroid-belt-1280×720.jpg). The densest-packed region of the solar system. Well, in that asteroid belt, **the distance between the nearest asteroids is hundreds of thousands of km**. From one asteroid it’s unlikely you could even *see* the next closest one without binoculars or a telescope.
The Voyager probes are the size of a van, and even the densest region of our solar system has spaces more than 10x the *width of Earth* between objects. They’re just not going to hit anything, space is too big and too empty.
And now that the probes have left the solar system, they’re in even-*more*-empty territory. It would be unlikely for them to hit anything for tens of thousands of years, never mind the few decades they’ve been flying for.
This is a good eli5 website to get a sense of the vastness and emptiness of our solar system: [https://www.joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html](https://www.joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html)
As others have said, space is almost incomprehensibly big. And relatively speaking, there’s very little inn space.
Imaging the Sun is a pool ball. Then the Earth is a grain of sand about 20 feet away from that pool ball. And Pluto is a spec of dust about 760 get from the Sun.
The entire solar system is bigger than 4 football fields placed end-to-end. And within those football fields is emptiness, aside from some specs of variable-sized dust whizzing around. Things do still collide, obviously. But probability wider, it’s pretty unusual.
Oh, and Proxima Centauri (the next nearest star system to us)? Yeah, that’s 977 miles away from our pool ball Sun. And there’s even less dust in that area of vacuum.
[Source](https://medium.com/@clay.c.edgar/if-earth-was-a-grain-of-sand-22ea58f43d5e).
Does anybody know how they’re able to communicate so far back to earth? Imagining the distance they traveled, it seems mind boggling that data could still reach back to us
As others have said space is astoundingly empty. Imagine a warehouse with no shelves. That’s just to clear your mind. Now imagine a warehouse with shelves. Your car keys are on one of those shelves. You’ll never find it.
Imagine tossing a ping pong ball into the Pacific Ocean from the US, and another from China. While there technically is a possibility of it happening, the odds of the two balls colliding with each other isn’t even worth considering
Comparing space to probes and asteroids is a bigger difference than o eans and ping pong balls
When the Milky Way and Andromeda “collide” there will likely be no collisions of planets / stars. That is how big space is.
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