How Fast are we Travelling through Space?

You might be standing, sitting, or lying down, you are at rest, as you are not moving. But, you are at rest only with respect to the things on earth, like your room. With respect to the void of space, this is not the case.

Rotation of Earth

Consider the movement of the earth’s surface with respect to the planet’s center. The earth rotates once every 23 hours, 56 minutes and 4.09053 seconds, called the sidereal period, and its circumference is roughly 40,075 kilometers. Thus, the surface of the earth at the equator moves at a speed of 460 meters per second–or roughly 1,000 miles per hour, which makes you travel a 1000 miles when you sit down for an hour.

Movement around the Sun

Through astronomy, we know that the earth is moving about our sun in a very nearly circular orbit. It covers this route at a speed of nearly 30 kilometers per second, or 67,000 miles per hour. Also, the sun is not stationary, its movement makes the trajectory path traced by the earth to form a helix, instead of circles.

Movement around the Galaxy

The sun, along with the entire solar system, moves around the center of our galaxy at some 220 kilometers per second, or 490,000 miles per hour. As we consider increasingly large size scales, the speeds involved become absolutely huge.

Movement through the Expanding Universe

We know that the universe is expanding at an accelerating rate, as the result of dark energy, which pushes the galaxies away from each other, if we add up all the movement a human on earth goes through, with respect to the cosmos, the speeds are literally phenomenal.

It is mind blowing to know that, it just took you a few minutes to go through this blog, as you finish reading this, comfortably sitting on a chair, in some random part of the earth, you have just travelled, thousands of kilometers across our Milky way galaxy!

For more interesting information follow us👇🏻thenookandcorner.wordpress.com

Instagram👇🏻https://instagram.com/the_nook_and_corner?igshid=1ax1x8pu970ou

Mail👉🏻thenookandcornerblog@gmail.com

Twitter 👉🏻 @thenookandcorn1