537,000 mph

[A. BETTIK]

Earth Sol Orion Spur orbital speed around Via Lactea's center of mass. Atronomy Sept 2011 is a good issue to pick up. It answers a lot of questions about our galaxy and where we are in it.

 

[Uninformed]

Do you have a link or a summary?


All this spinning is making me feel like Jesus suspended over Rome. <La Dolce Vita reference>

 

[Longhorny630]

 

[OldHippie]

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.

Monty Python

 

[Giovanni Jones]

I love the Galaxy Song from MP's The Meaning of Life
The Link

 

[A. BETTIK]

In reply to:

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[A. BETTIK]

I believe this image was used in the article above.

 

[OldHippie]

In reply to:

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[Dionysus]

I may have misunderstood, but watching some of the recent science-related programs, reading Hawking, etc — I seem to recall them saying that black holes are thought to exist in various places throughout the galaxies, not necessarily just at the center. If a black hole is created by the collapse of a star then it seems like this could occur anywhere irrespective of the star’s location within the galaxy.

 

[OldHippie]

I think you probably have the same understanding of the formation of black holes from dying stars that I do, but these "supermassive" black holes believed to be at the center of most galaxies seem to be of a different order. Or not. I'm no astrophysicist.

 

[Bevo Incognito]

Six stars of the Northern Cross
In mourning for their sister's loss
In a final flash of glory
Nevermore to grace the night

 

[A. BETTIK]

Here's some simple division. If the Milky Way has about 200 billion stars, our galactic black hole has 3-4 million solar masses and say our galaxy is 13 billion years old then:

1) The galactic black hole gobbles up at most a star every 1-3 thousand years.

2) The galactic blackhole has gobbled up only 1/50,000th of just the currently estimated number of stars in our galaxy.

3) Although I haven't done the math or googling to check, it may be our universe, given some hard to believe inflation models, tears itself apart before our central black hole gobbles the rest of our galaxy up.

Also, at 537,000 mph, if we could get away from our galaxy at that speed, it would only take about 1,246 years to get to the nearest galaxy, Andromeda if I did my math right the first time and assuming correct unit conversions. (1 light year)(186000 miles/sec)(hr/537000 miles)

Another, sort of James Burkian way to look at that, is we have been to Andromeda and back, distance wise, since sometime around the founding of Rome or the Battle of Marathon where a few European city-states soundly kicked Iran's ***.