Even if you never leave your hometown, you’ll end up covering an impressive galactic distance thanks to the constant hustle of our solar system and the Milky Way.
Things may feel pretty stationary when you’re relaxing in front of the TV, but the truth is we’re constantly moving at incredible speeds. The universe is a dynamic place full of energy and the motion caused by that energy. Although we’re not aware of it, we’re all along for an intense ride through space.
The most mundane element of our journey is the movement caused by Earth’s daily rotation. While it depends on exactly which latitude each person is at, the Earth’s rotation whips those located at the equator through space at approximately 1,600 km (1,000 miles) per hour. Manned air speeds have already broken that record — on March 10, 1956, Peter Twiss became the first man to fly at a speed above 1,600 km per hour, by clocking in at 1,822 km (1,132 miles) per hour while piloting the supersonic Fairey Delta 2.
SEE ALSO: The Many Ways a Star Can Die
But Earth’s spin pales in comparison to our planet’s yearly migration around the sun. The circumference of Earth’s orbit is about 15 million km (93 million miles). To travel that far in 365 days, Earth zooms through space at 106,200 km (66,000 miles) per hour. That means each of us travels the distance between London and Beijing about every five minutes.
Even as the Earth spins on its axis and circles the Sun, our host star likes to take its planets and other assorted satellites on a leisurely stroll around the neighborhood. The problem with measuring the sun’s locomotion is that the entire galaxy is shifting so we have no stable reference point. But if we simply compare our Sun’s motion to the average motion of the stars in our neighborhood, which astronomers call the “local standard of rest,” our solar system drifts along at about 69,000 km (43,000 miles) per hour.
Feeling dizzy yet?
On top of that, the entire Milky Way galaxy spins like a merry-go-round. The time it takes for our sun to make its pilgrimage around the center of the galaxy is called our “cosmic year,” and it lasts about 225 million Earth-years. To make its journey around the galaxy in that time, the sun drags us along at 777,000 km (483,000 miles) per hour. According to our best guess, life on Earth began about 15 cosmic years ago. If the cosmic year were divided into 365 “cosmic days,” our species hasn’t even existed for half a cosmic day.
And now we move into even murkier territory. While astronomers can use the motion of nearby stars to arrive at an estimate for our solar system’s pace, it’s harder to figure out a frame of reference when we’re considering the constant motion of every single particle in the universe. But the Big Bang left bread crumbs that astronomers can use to gauge the rate of the universe’s expansion: cosmic background radiation, which are radio waves left over from that tumultuous inception. By observing how these waves have expanded over the universe’s life so far, astronomers estimate that the Milky Way is flying through space at 2 million km (1.3 million miles) per hour!
So don’t feel too guilty the next time you’re in the mood for a Netflix lie-in. In the time it takes to re-watch all seven seasons of Mad Men, you’ll have racked up about 144 million km (90 million miles) in the meantime.
Based on materials published by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.
Facebook comments