How Fast Are We Moving?

An article at Big Think has some interesting facts about our actual movement. Here are a few excerpts:

Someone at the greatest distance from Earth’s center located at the equator — 0° latitude — travels at 1676 kilometers per hour (1042 miles per hour), but the higher your latitude is, the slower you move due to the rotating Earth. Someone at 45° latitude moves at a speed of only 1183 km/hr (735 mi/hr), and someone at either the north or south pole wouldn’t move at all; they’d simply complete a rotation while always remaining at Earth’s geographic pole.

But that's actually pretty slow compared to our speed as we orbit the sun:

At its fastest, Earth moves at 30.29 km/s (18.82 mi/s), while at its slowest, it moves at only 29.29 km/s (18.50 mi/s): a difference of about 3%.

But as fast as this is, it's about seven times slower that the speed with which our entire solar system moves around the center of our galaxy:

It’s estimated that our Sun’s speed around the Milky Way is somewhere around 220 km/s (137.5 mi/s): about seven times as great as our planet’s motion around the Sun.

It's also interesting that if we picture the orbits of the planets as lying on a flat disc with the sun at the center, the solar system is moving around the galactic center tilted at an angle of about 60 degrees from the plane of the galaxy.

The Milky Way is located in a cluster of galaxies called the Local Group. Our Local Group is moving through the universe at a speed of about 375 mi/s.

The largest and most massive galaxy in the Local Group is Andromeda, located around 2.5 million light-years away and containing perhaps double the Milky Way’s mass. Andromeda and the Milky Way are on a collision course:

When we factor in the direction and speed with which the Sun moves through the Milky Way, we can determine that the Milky Way and Andromeda are speeding toward one another at 109 km/s; we’re on a collision course that should culminate with a great galactic merger that will begin in about ~4 billion years.

When you add all of these motions together:

• the Earth spinning on its axis,
• the Earth revolving around the Sun,
• the Sun moving through the galaxy,
• the Milky Way heading toward Andromeda,
• the motion of the Local Group

It turns out that we're doing a lot of moving, even when we feel like we're sitting still.