And how fast is the Milky Way Galaxy moving? The speed turns out to be an astounding 1.3 million miles per hour (2.1 million km/hr)! We are moving roughly in the direction on the sky that is defined by the constellations of Leo and Virgo.
Any life forms still there, though, will be treated to some pretty spectacular cosmic choreography. Currently, Andromeda and the Milky Way are about 2.5 million light-years apart. Fueled by gravity, the two galaxies are hurtling toward one another at 402,000 kilometers per hour.
So, Earth travels about 1.6 million miles (2.6 million km) a day, or 66,627 mph (107,226 km/h).
Because even the Sun itself isn't stationary. 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.
Our Milky Way is on a collision course with another spiral galaxy called Andromeda. Today Andromeda is visible as a speck of light in the night sky, but about 5 billion years from now, it will be tangled up with us. Our galaxy's spiral arms will disappear, and so will our supermassive black hole.
Planet Earth is located in the Milky Way Galaxy. Our sun, the center of the solar system, is one star among hundreds of billions of stars that form the Milky Way. This giant conglomeration of suns, with 100 billion planets, cosmic dust, and gases, is our home galaxy.
But, for the most part, we don't feel the Earth itself spinning because we are held close to the Earth's surface by gravity and the constant speed of rotation. Our planet has been spinning for billions of years and will continue to spin for billions more.
The light from distant objects does indeed get redshifted, but not because anything is receding faster than light, nor because anything is expanding faster than light. Space simply expands; it's us who shoehorns in a “speed” because that's what we're familiar with.
The difference isn't noticeable though — after spending six months on the ISS, astronauts have aged about 0.005 seconds less than the rest of us.
Third Row, Right: In 4 billion years Andromeda is tidally stretched and the Milky Way becomes warped. Fourth Row, Left: In 5.1 billion years the cores of the Milky Way and Andromeda appear as a pair of bright lobes.
Andromeda–Milky Way collision
The merger will totally alter the night sky over Earth but will likely leave the solar system unharmed, according to NASA.
Even if you could travel at the speed of light (300,000 kilometers, or 186,000 miles, per second), it would take you about 25,000 years to reach the middle of the Milky Way. If we could travel outside our galaxy and look back, this is what our Milky Way Galaxy might look like from above.
Astronaut Thomas Jones said it "carries a distinct odor of ozone, a faint acrid smell…a little like gunpowder, sulfurous." Tony Antonelli, another space-walker, said space "definitely has a smell that's different than anything else." A gentleman named Don Pettit was a bit more verbose on the topic: "Each time, when I ...
Ultimately, while astronauts' salaries are generally modest while they're working, they can still sometimes get a hefty payout once they retire from active duty. In short: no, astronauts do not get paid for life.
People in a coma will not age like conscious people living life. Muscles weaken & emaciate. The damaged part of the brain might deteriorate as a result of inflammation to the area.
Darkness travels at the speed of light. More accurately, darkness does not exist by itself as a unique physical entity, but is simply the absence of light.
The trite answer is that both space and time were created at the big bang about 14 billion years ago, so there is nothing beyond the universe. However, much of the universe exists beyond the observable universe, which is maybe about 90 billion light years across.
The light that travels the longest gets stretched by the greatest amount, and the object that emitted that light is now at a greater distance because the universe is expanding. We can see objects up to 46.1 billion light-years away precisely because of the expanding universe.
The reason is something called 'inertia. ' The Earth is rotating and always spins toward the east. Suppose you're about to take off in an airplane, in that same direction. Whether you realize it or not – as you sit on the runway – your plane is already moving at the same speed Earth spins.
If our planet were to lose gravity for even five seconds, it would spell the end of life on Earth as we know it. Gravity pulls objects toward one another. The more massive an object is, the stronger its gravitational pull. The closer you are to an object, the stronger its gravitational pull.
Earth isn't likely to ever get tidally locked to the Sun — we're too far away for that to happen. And, though our planet's rotation is slowing down ever so slightly (a day gets about 1.7 milliseconds longer every century), our planet should never stop spinning completely.
Our Milky Way galaxy is just one of the billions of galaxies in the universe. Within it, there are at least 100 billion stars, and on average, each star has at least one planet orbiting it. This means there are potentially thousands of planetary systems like our solar system within the galaxy!
Our universe is also called the cosmos. It is originally a greek word. In early days it was thought that our Galaxy constituted the entire universe.
In a new study, Stanford physicists Andrei Linde and Vitaly Vanchurin have calculated the number of all possible universes, coming up with an answer of 10^10^16.
In space we can assume that there would be no external organisms such as insects and fungi to break down the body, but we still carry plenty of bacteria with us. Left unchecked, these would rapidly multiply and cause putrefaction of a corpse on board the shuttle or the ISS.