How fast are you traveling right now?

Hopefully, your answer is something like “zero” or “I’m not moving at all” unless you are reading this as a passenger in a car, plane or bus. Whatever your answer is, I can say with a reasonable amount of assurance that you are wrong. Some of you may be way ahead of me here, but my guess is that most of you never give this subject much thought. I’m about to change all of that. I’m sorry–and you’re welcome.

I’m going to do some rounding here to make this easy to explain, but I’m sure you will agree that it really won’t make much difference. Rounded or not, these numbers will make you uncomfortable.

I live at about the 35th parallel, geographically speaking. I’m in Knoxville, Tennessee. The circumference of the earth at that point is roughly 24,000 miles. Wherever the sun is in the sky right now will be the same place, more or less, I will find it twenty-four hours from now. The math here is very simple. I have to go 24,000 miles in 24 hours. That’s 1,000 miles per hour, roughly twice the speed of a commercial jetliner. Can you feel it? Wait. I’m just getting started.

One year is the time it takes the earth to make one orbit around our friendly neighborhood star, the sun. That’s 365 days, plus that weird leap-year adjustment thing. How far do we have to go in that year? Pretty far. 584 million miles to be more or less exact. I won’t bore you with the simple multiplication and division to get there, but that works out to about 67,000 miles per hour. At that clip, you could go from New York to Los Angeles in less than two and a half minutes.

So now you are spinning around the globe at a thousand miles per hour and whipping around the sun at 67,000 miles per hour at the same time. It’s a solar system-sized version of the teacup ride at Disney World! But that’s still only the beginning.

At the center of our galaxy, the Milky Way, lies a supermassive black hole dubbed Sagittarius A. Everything in the 100,000 light-year-sized disk that is the galaxy swirls around this central point. Billions of stars and all of their associated planets are caught in Sagittarius A’s orbit. We’re hanging out about halfway down an arm of the spiral. Giant-brained scientists with equally massive telescopes and really nifty calculators have figured that our solar system is travelling in its orbit within the Milky Way at about 448,000 miles per hour. Traveling this fast, I could go from my house in Knoxville to the place I was born in Kingsport, Tennessee (about 110 miles away) in less than one second.

To summarize …

Around the earth’s axis : 1,000 miles per hour
Around the sun : 67,000 miles per hour
Around the galaxy : 447,000 miles per hour

It boggles the mind. Let’s boggle it just a bit more.

The Milky Way itself is not sitting still. It is flying through space toward its nearest galactic neighbor, Andromeda. The two galaxies are hurtling toward each other at about 250,000 miles per hour. One day, about four billion years from now, they will collide. Make sure your seatbelt is securely fastened and your tray tables are in the upright and locked position.

This article was written by Tilmer Wright, Jr. Tilmer is an IT professional with over thirty years of experience wrestling with technology and a proud member of the Authors Guild of Tennessee. In his spare time, he writes books. You can find links to Tilmer’s books at the following location:

https://www.amazon.com/Tilmer-Wright/e/B00DVKGG4K?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1…

His author information web site is here: http://www.tilmerwrightjr.com/

Photo credit: Pablo Andrés Ortega Chávez - Flickr, GFDL 1.2, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37452397