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Mini Magazine
- Saturday, April 29, 2023 17:12 (GMT+7)
- 17:12 29/4/2023
Illustrations of the Solar System do not accurately depict the size or movement of the planets in the universe.
You may have seen many images of the Solar System; however, for illustrative purposes, these images often don't represent things to scale. Most exaggerate the size of the planets and place them much closer together than they actually are to make them easier for viewers to visualize. If you were to observe the Solar System in real life, all the celestial bodies would be too small, faint, and far apart to be seen with the naked eye.
In the real universe, the Solar System looks like the night sky as seen from Earth. In fact, when we look up at the night sky, we are seeing a large part of the Solar System.
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The planets and their orbits are shown to scale, with some orbits, including Earth's, being significantly closer to the Sun than the outer planets. Image: Spacecentre . |
If simulated to scale, from an outside perspective, the most easily observable object is the Sun, but even that is just a small speck of light. Some large planets look like stars, while others are too faint to be seen.
The actual movement of the Earth and the Solar System
The planets all rotate on their axes and revolve around the Sun. A person on Earth might feel like they are standing still, but that's not the case on a cosmic scale. The Earth rotates on its axis at a speed of nearly 1700 km/h or 0.5 km/s.
The number may sound large at first, but compared to other movements within the Solar System and the Milky Way galaxy that are influencing and determining the speed of planetary movement in the universe, this is still not an odd number.
Like other planets in the Solar System, Earth orbits the Sun much faster than it orbits itself. Earth's speed around the Sun is 30 km/s. After 365 days, Earth will return to its starting point, or more precisely, near its starting point, because the Sun is not stationary either.
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An accurate model of how planets orbit the Sun, then move through the galaxy in a different direction of motion, while always remaining in the same plane. Image: Rhys Taylor . |
Stars, planets, gas clouds, dust particles, black holes, dark matter, and many other things in the Milky Way galaxy are all in motion. From Earth's observation point, about 25,000 light-years from the galactic center, the Sun orbits the Milky Way in an elliptical path, completing one revolution every 220–250 million years.
The estimated speed of the Sun during this journey is about 200–220 km/s, a large number compared to both the Earth's rotation speed and the rotation speed of the planet around the Sun, both of which are tilted at an angle to the Sun's plane of motion around the galaxy.
However, throughout their journey, the planets remain in the same plane, with no phenomenon of one moving ahead of the other or being pulled behind, as some illustrations often depict.
368 km/s is the speed at which humans are moving in space.
And the entire Milky Way galaxy is not stationary, but is in motion due to the gravitational pull of matter in the universe. In the local cluster, a complex of more than 50 galaxies including the Milky Way, it is possible to measure the Milky Way's speed of movement when compared to the largest galaxy in the cluster, Andromeda.
This galaxy is moving toward our Sun at a speed of 301 km/s. Taking into account the Sun's movement within the Milky Way, Andromeda and the Milky Way are moving toward each other at a speed of approximately 109 km/s.
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On the largest scale, it's not just the Earth and the Sun that move, but entire galaxies and local clusters that move due to invisible forces. Image: NASA/ESA. |
The local cluster, though large and containing many galaxies, is not isolated. Other galaxies and surrounding clusters exert a gravitational pull. Scientists estimate that these structures, far removed from Earth, add an extra 300 km/s to their velocity.
Adding all these movements together—the Earth rotating on its own axis, the Earth orbiting the Sun, the Sun moving around the galaxy, the Milky Way toward Andromeda, and the local cluster being pulled and pushed by surrounding regions—that's the speed at which we're actually moving through the universe.
The speed of movement reaches up to 368 km/s in a particular direction, plus or minus about 30 km/s, depending on the time of year and the direction the Earth is rotating, according to Ethan Siegal, a PhD in astrophysicism at the University of Florida, who writes the blog Starts With A Bang .
Our planet and other planets orbit the Sun in a plane, and that entire plane moves in elliptical orbits through the Milky Way galaxy.
Because all Sun-like stars in the galaxy also move in an elliptical path, the Solar System appears to move in and out of the plane of the Milky Way in cycles of tens of millions of years, and it takes about 200-250 million years to complete one rotation around the Milky Way.
Big Questions - The Universe
The book addresses fundamental issues in natural science, in the form of a discussion of 20 questions about astronomy and the universe, such as: What is the universe? How vast is the universe? Why do planets always orbit?...
Hoang Nam
universe solar system earth orbit speed
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