By the time you get to the North or South poles, your spin is very slow indeed — it takes an entire day to spin in place. Space agencies love to take advantage of Earth's spin. If they're sending humans to the International Space Station, for example, the preferred location to do so is close to the equator. That's why cargo missions to the International Space Station, for example, launch from Florida.
By doing so and launching in the same direction as Earth's spin, rockets get a speed boost to help them fly into space. Earth's spin, of course, is not the only motion we have in space. We can calculate that with basic geometry.
First, we have to figure out how far Earth travels. Earth takes about days to orbit the sun. The orbit is an ellipse, but to make the math simpler, let's say it's a circle. So, Earth's orbit is the circumference of a circle. The distance from Earth to the sun — called an astronomical unit — is 92,, miles ,, kilometers , according to the International Astronomers Union. That is the radius r. So in one year, Earth travels about million miles million km.
So, Earth travels about 1. Related: How Fast does Light Travel? The sun has an orbit of its own in the Milky Way. The sun is about 25, light-years from the center of the galaxy, and the Milky Way is at least , light-years across. We are thought to be about halfway out from the center, according to Stanford University. Even at this rapid speed, the solar system would take about million years to travel all the way around the Milky Way. The Milky Way, too, moves in space relative to other galaxies.
What might be much more noticeable is that some of our satellites would be off-track. If the planet speeds up by 1 mph, then the satellites will no longer in their proper positions, meaning satellite communications, television broadcasting, and military and intelligence operations could be interrupted, at least temporarily. For now, gravity is stronger and it keeps you grounded.
Currently, if you weigh about pounds in the Arctic Circle, you might weigh pounds at the equator. Press fast-forward on that, and your weight would drop even further. Odenwald calculates that eventually, if the equator revved up to 17, mph, the centrifugal force would be great enough that you would be essentially weightless.
More on that later. The faster the Earth spins, the shorter our days would become. But if we were rotating mph faster than usual, a day would be about 22 hours long. For our bodies, that would be like daylight savings time on boosters.
The majority of us probably didn't notice was a little shorter than other years, but it could result in small changes to the length of the days in According to USA Today , each day may wind up being 0. This translates to a new leap second, a concept first noted in the s when scientists began studying the changes via an atomic clock. We will probably not feel the change this year, either, though there will be some industries and systems that will experience minor issues.
USA Today reports that some computer systems, specifically in the areas of GPS navigation, spaceflight, satellites , stock market, and those used by astronomers will be impacted in some way by these shortened days.
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