How fast is galaxy moving through space

A person at the north or south pole actually has a rotational speed of zero, and is effectively turning on the spot. Actually, rotational speed around the Earth is also dependent on altitude above sea level, and a person at the top of a mountain on the Equator is actually traveling faster than 1, kilometers per hour as he has further to go with each revolution. Taking this to an extreme, an object in geostationary orbit around the Earth at an altitude of about 36, kilometers above the ground has to travel at about 11, kilometers per hour.

But that is not all. The Earth circles around the Sun at about , kilometers per hour. Our Solar System is rotating around the Milky Way galaxy at about , kilometers per hour. That might sound like a big number, but relative to the other contributions to our motion through the Universe, it's barely a blip on the cosmic radar.

The Earth spinning on its axis gives us a speed of just 0. But there are other motions that matter more. The speed at which planets revolve around the Sun far exceeds the rotation speeds of any of them, Much like all the planets in our Solar System, Earth orbits the Sun at a much speedier clip than its rotational speed. The inner planets — Mercury and Venus — move faster, while the outer worlds like Mars and beyond move slower than this.

The difference is severe: Mercury makes about 4 orbits for every 1 of Earth's, and it takes Neptune over Earth orbits before it's completed even one revolution. Moreover, as the planets orbit in the plane of the solar system, they change their direction-of-motion continuously, with Earth returning to its starting point after days. Well, almost to its same exact starting point. An accurate model of how the planets orbit the Sun, which then moves through the galaxy in a Note that the planets are all in the same plane, and are not dragging behind the Sun or forming a wake of any type.

Our Milky Way galaxy is huge, massive, and most importantly, is in motion. All the stars, planets, gas clouds, dust grains, black holes, dark matter and more move around inside of it, contributing to and affected by its net gravity.

From our vantage point, some 25, light years from the galactic center, the Sun speeds around in an ellipse, making a complete revolution once every — million years or so. Throughout it, though, the planets remain in the same plane, with no "dragging" or vortex patterns emerging.

Although the Sun orbits within the plane of the Milky Way some 25,, light years from the But the galaxy itself isn't stationary, but rather moves due to the gravitational attraction of all the overdense matter clumps and, equally, due to the lack of gravitational attraction from all of the underdense regions.

Within our local group, we can measure our speed towards the largest, massive galaxy in our cosmic backyard: Andromeda. The largest galaxy in the Local Group, Andromeda, appears small and insignificant next to the Milky As we consider increasingly large size scales, the speeds involved become absolutely huge! The galaxies in our neighborhood are also rushing at a speed of nearly 1, kilometers per second towards a structure called the Great Attractor, a region of space roughly million light-years one light year is about six trillion miles away from us.

This Great Attractor, having a mass quadrillion times greater than our sun and span of million light-years, is made of both the visible matter that we can see along with the so-called dark matter that we cannot see. Each of the motions described above were given relative to some structure. Our motion about our sun was described relative to our sun, while the motion of our local group of galaxies was described as toward the Great Attractor.

The question arises: Is there some universal frame of reference relative to which we can define the motions of all things? In , the COBE satellite was placed in orbit about the earth again, the earth is the frame of reference! This radiation, which remains from the immensely hot and dense primordial fireball that was our early universe, is known as the cosmic microwave background radiation CBR.

The CBR presently pervades all of space. Our galaxy belongs to a cluster of nearby galaxies, the Local Group, and together we are easing toward the center of our cluster at a leisurely 25 miles a second. If all this isn't enough to make you feel you deserve an intergalactic speeding ticket, consider that we, along with our cousins in the Local Group, are hurtling at a truly astonishing miles a second toward the Virgo Cluster, an enormous collection of galaxies some 45 million light-years away.

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