When Voyager 1 launched in 1977, it began an indefinite journey into space, serving as an envoy for humankind. Today, it's the farthest manmade object from Earth, orbiting over 15 billion miles from the sun in interstellar space.
If you were out there, where everything we know is so far away and life itself is foreign, would you even be within the influence of our sun? From such a distance, could you actually see anything out there, or is it all eternal blackness?
A user on the forum Reddit asked that very question: If we were somehow able to stand next to Voyager 1 in space, would we be able to see it?
Yes, you can easily see Voyager 1 if you were traveling next to it
We asked Michael Zemcov, an experimental astrophysicist and professor at Rochester Institute of Technology, to explain it, so you don't have to dust off your calculator to do the math yourself.
"Oh, gosh, that's, so this is a really interesting question," Zemcov told Insider.
To start, he said even though both Voyager 1 and 2 are way out in space, beyond all major planets, it's still pretty bright.
He took us through the math for Voyager 1.
First, you must compare Voyager's distance to the distance between Earth and the sun. Then, you use that distance to calculate what the light intensity would be that far away from the sun. READ MORE...
