ok...I know that we are travelling around the sun at about 18.5 miles per second........?

Question

If the sun is also orbiting the centre of the milky way galagy, this must increase the speed that we are travelling through space. How fast are we actually moving

Answer 1

Yes, the sun is orbiting the center of our galaxy. It takes about 200 million years to make one orbit.

The question of how fast we are 'actually moving' is a rather subtle one. According to special relativity, all motion is relative. In other words, you cannot say how fast you are 'really going', just how fast you are going past something else. In special relativity, you can always consider yourself to be at rest (although you might be accelerating).

However, special relativity is not the whole story. We live in an expanding universe. The background radiation from the Big Bang gives a frame of reference for talking about motion. In this frame, we are going at about 1% of the speed of light. In other words, around 300 kilometers per second. Our motion is mostly due to gravity of the 'Great Attractor'. THis is a huge wall of galaxies whose gravity is pulling us in.

Answer 2

There's no such thing as "how fast we are actually moving." You can only specify how fast we are actually moving relative to some outside body. The Sun moves much faster in its orbit than the Earth does, so we're always moving relative to the center of the Milky Way at something between 200 and 240 km/s.

Answer 3

Albert Einstein published his theory of relativity in 1905. There is no absolute position an object can have, therefore, you can never establish an absolute speed or velocity of any object - get it? No one knows and no one can ever know "how fast we are ACTUALLY moving", to answer your question. Thats relativity. You can only say that we are moving at such and such a speed, "relative to some other object".

Answer 4

http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2001/AngelaChan.shtml
"The sun circles the Milky Way at a speed of about 486000 miles per hour." (13.5 miles per second)
So you have to add and subtract from that so part of the time the earth is traveling away from the center of the milky way.