We know the universe itself is rapidly expanding but did you know it was doing so somewhere between 68 and 80 km/s? I know, this might not seem like a lot to some but it’s quite insane to think about.
While a mere second here on Earth doesn’t feel like much it’s more than enough time for thousands of stars to be born, almost one hundred stars to explode, and so much more. There are tons of different things going on outside of our planet and on our planet each and every second of the days that pass.
I recently started looking into all of this and well, it has me blown away. The more we think we know about space and the things beyond our reach the more we learn. Through opening our minds, we are able to tap into so much more.
Scientific American wrote as follows about space and how quickly things happen which I felt was worth noting here:
As schoolchildren, we learn that the earth is moving about our sun in a very nearly circular orbit. It covers this route at a speed of nearly 30 kilometers per second, or 67,000 miles per hour. In addition, our solar system–Earth and all–whirls around the center of our galaxy at some 220 kilometers per second, or 490,000 miles per hour. As we consider increasingly large size scales, the speeds involved become absolutely huge!
The galaxies in our neighborhood are also rushing at a speed of nearly 1,000 kilometers per second towards a structure called the Great Attractor, a region of space roughly 150 million light-years (one light year is about six trillion miles) away from us. This Great Attractor, having a mass 100 quadrillion times greater than our sun and span of 500 million light-years, is made of both the visible matter that we can see along with the so-called dark matter that we cannot see.
Yes, there are even things happening around us that we cannot see. Right now even if you’re sitting still not blinking, you’re moving. We are on a celestial body floating through the dark in the middle of something we know very little about and well, that in itself is enough to get my gears turning and always has ever since I was a child.
If you like all things space and want to learn a bit about the things that happen each second, take a peek at the video below. While the numbers within it are approximate they put a lot into perspective. One second is so much more than most stop to realize, let that sink in.