system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Could we send a probe to a star in another galaxy?

Ignoring the fact that we'd be dead long long long before it reached its destination, and rejecting the possibility of faster than light travel (as we don't have it right now) could we successfully target a probe or some other object to pass close to a star in another galaxy?

First, do we know enough about the position and movement of any other galaxy, let alone the stars within, to be able to predict where the star we're aiming for will be in the millions of years it will take to reach it?  Seems like we'd have to be very accurate with both, and we haven't had a lot of time to track them and predict where they're going to be (relative to how long they've been moving.)

Second, can we predict or ignore the forces acting on the probe?  Would intrastellar wind cause the probe to be thrown off track before it even left the galaxy?  Is there any evidence of any intergalactic forces aside from gravity?  Would gravity from distant galaxies have enough of an effect to pull the probe off course, or could we predict that effect enough to compensate?

Third, could we get an object to a star in another galaxy before said star had burned out?  I don't know what the top speed we'd be able to accurately send a probe is, obviously well short of light speed, and don't know how long it would take and how that number would compare to the life expectancy of any star, or how much we know about life expectancies of a given star in a different galaxy.
gpt
With technology available right now, not a chance. We couldn't get it to go fast enough to escape our own galaxy. The Sun is orbiting about 220 km/s in the Milky Way, escape velocity from the galaxy around the solar system is around 500 km/s. So we'd need the probe to have about 300 km/s velocity leaving the solar system. Voyagers are going around 17 km/s or so. If we really wanted to, we could certainly improve on Voyagers, but not by that much.

And the other points you bring up could present problems as well. At such long time scales, the movement of stars is hard to predict accurately. You're essentially dealing with an n-body problem with no analytical solutions. You'll just have to do numerical simulations to figure out where things are moving. Even the movement of the planets in our solar system are hard to predict accurately millions of years into the future.

If you accurately want to get close to a specific star then you'll certainly need to eventually do course corrections along the way. There's no way we'd be able to make the power on the probe last long enough for any computer on board to make the corrections.