| HOW FAST ARE WE TRAVELLING THROUGH SPACE? |
A person on the equator is rotating around the Earth at about 1,660 kilometres per hour. A person at the north or south pole actually has a rotational speed of zero, and is effectively turning on the spot. Somewhere in between, a person’s rotational speed decreases as they move from the equator towards the pole: for example, a person in Toronto, at around 45°N, is travelling about 1,230 kilometres per hour.
Actually, rotational speed around the Earth is also dependent on altitude above sea level, and a person at the top of a mountain on the Equator is actually travelling faster than 1,660 kilometres per hour (as he has further to go with each revolution). Taking this to an extreme, an object in geostationary orbit around the Earth at an altitude of about 36,000 kilometres above the ground has to travel at about 11,000 kilometres per hour.
But that is not all. The Earth circles around the Sun at about 107,000 kilometres per hour. Our Solar System is rotating around the Milky Way galaxy at about 700,000 kilometres per hour. The galaxy is also travelling at huge speed away from every other galaxy as the universe continues to expand, although with vastly differing relative speeds depending on the distances of the galaxies from us. To give some indication, scientists have calculated that our galaxy is travelling at about 2.2 million kilometres per hour relative to the cosmic background radiation which pervades the universe.