Hello! It’s time for Fact Friday with Screenhog. I am Screenhog, and today we’re talking about our speedy Earth.
It’s probably not something you think about much, but you are constantly in motion because the Earth is moving all the time. Our planet Earth is always in motion in a few different ways. First, there’s the rotation of the earth around its axis once every 24 hours; we, of course, call this a “day”. Secondly, there’s the Earth’s revolution around the sun every 365 ¼ days, which we call a “year”. But there’s also a third one; the “galactic year”. This is the time it takes for our whole solar system -- sun, planets, and all -- to revolve around the Milky Way galaxy. This takes somewhere between 225 and 250 million of our years.
With all this in mind, how fast does the earth really move? Well, it’s the galactic year that really answers this question for us. Because of how fast we rotate around the Milky Way, if you compare the Earth’s position to a fixed point in the universe, this planet is travelling around 220 km/sec (around 140 mi/sec). This is about 500 times faster than the speed of the average bullet. This means that every single day of your life you have been travelling at superspeed. (Granted, our solar system is doing most of the work, and everyone else is doing this too, but hey, it’s still gotta count for something, right?)
This has been Fact Friday. Screenhog out.