The Voyager 1 probe is 24 billion kilometers from the sun, but it can still be illuminated by it.

CTOnews.com, October 15, 1977, Voyager 1 began its journey into space as an emissary of humans. According to CTOnews.com, it is now the farthest man-made object from Earth, orbiting the sun at a distance of more than 24 billion kilometers in interstellar space.

At this distance, can you still see anything in space, or is it an eternal darkness? A user of the Reddit forum asked such a question: if we can stand next to Voyager 1, can we see it?

Michael Zemcov, an experimental astrophysicist and professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology, explained the problem, saying that although Voyager 1 and 2 were in space far from all major planets, it was still bright.

Zemcov calculated the current situation of Voyager 1, calculating the light intensity so far away from the sun based on the distance between Voyager 1 and the Earth and the sun, so that he can get an estimate, which is about one-25000 of the Earth's daytime brightness, which is still about 15 times brighter than the Earth's brightness on a clear night when the moon is full.

Zemcov said that at this brightness, you can definitely see the details of the side of the probe facing the sun, but you may not be able to see all its colors.

Even if Voyager 1 continues to travel into space, the probe will still be illuminated for a long time, possibly for hundreds or even thousands of years, because the sun has such a large range of influence.

The distance traveled by the Voyager probe is amazing from a human point of view, but it is still a very short distance from a cosmic point of view.