Voyager I is leaving the solar system again! [1]

[1] https://xkcd.com/1189/

Lol.

I know it's a joke but it's because there's no clearly defined end of the solar system.

Just re-reading Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan and he talks about this. If we define the end of the solar system as the point where the suns gravity no longer holds, then it's going to be a very long time for it to escape the solar system.

I'm going to go find that passage in the book. Hopefully I can find it before the edit window closes for this comment.

Edit:

OK, I found it. This excerpt is from the book "Pale Blue Dot" by Carl Sagan, in the Chapter - AN AMERICAN SHIP AT THE FRONTIERS OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM .

THE VOYAGER SPACECRAFT are bound for the stars. They are on escape trajectories from the Solar System, barreling along at almost a million miles a day. The gravitational fields of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune have flung them at such high speeds that they have broken the bonds that once tied them to the Sun.

Have they left the Solar System yet? The answer depends very much on how you define the boundary of the Sun's realm. If it's the orbit of the outermost good-sized planet, then the Voyager spacecraft are already long gone; there are probably no undiscovered Neptunes. If you mean the outermost planet, it may be that there are other—perhaps Triton-like—planets far beyond Neptune and Pluto; if so, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are still within the Solar System. If you define the outer limits of the Solar System as the heliopause—where the interplanetary particles and magnetic fields are replaced by their interstellar counterparts—then neither Voyager has yet left the Solar System, although they may do so in the next few decades.* But if your definition of the edge of the Solar System is the distance at which our star can no longer hold worlds in orbit about it, then the Voyagers will not leave the Solar System for hundreds of centuries.

Weakly grasped by the Sun's gravity, in every direction in the sky, is that immense horde of a trillion comets or more, the Oort Cloud. The two spacecraft will finish passage through the Oort Cloud in another 20,000 years or so. Then, at last, completely gone long good-bye to the Solar System, broken free of the gravitational shackles that once bound them to the Sun, the Voyagers will make for the open sea of interstellar space. Only then will Phase Two of their mission begin.

Their radio transmitters long dead, the spacecraft will wander for ages in the calm, cold interstellar blackness—where there is almost nothing to erode them. Once out of the Solar System, they will remain intact for a billion years or more, as they circumnavigate the center of the Milky Way galaxy.

We do not know whether there are other spacefaring civilizations in the Milky Way. If they do exist, we do not know how abundant they are, much less where they are. But there is at least a chance that sometime in the remote future one of the Voyagers will be intercepted and examined by an alien craft.

*Radio signals that both Voyagers detected in 1992 are thought to arise from the collision of powerful gusts of solar wind with the thin gas that lies between the stars. From the immense power of the signal (over 10 trillion watts), the distance to the heliopause can be estimated: about 100 times the Earth's distance from the Sun. At the speed it's leaving the Solar System, Voyager 1 might pierce the heliopause and enter interstellar space around the year 2010. If its radioactive power source is still working, news of the crossing will be radioed back to the stay-at-homes on Earth. The energy released by the collision of this shock wave with the heliopause makes it the most powerful source of radio emission in the Solar System. It makes you wonder whether even stronger shocks in other planetary systems might be detectable by our radio telescopes.

End of quotation.

If you're interested, I highly recommend the book and everything by Carl Sagan. He was incapable of writing a dull sentence.

Wrote down some of my thoughts on the Voyager probes in my blog here - https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know