Planet Earth

PLANET EARTH

Planet Earth is where your born, where you live and where you die. Chances are you are going to spent a lot of time here, so I think it's about time you realised exactly what it is that you live on.

Planet Earth is 1 of 8, in what is known as our Solar System.
We are the third closest planet to the Sun which is our local star at a mean distance of 92.7 million miles.
It weighs an incredible 5,976,000,000,000,000,000,000,000kg.
It is 7,926 miles wide.
We have 1 moon at a distance of 250,000 miles. It is just over one quarter the size of the Earth at 2,474 miles.
The orbit of Earth is not perfectly circular but very slightly elliptical. Its major axis measures 90,057,927 miles and its minor axis measures 90,045,353 miles.
At closest approach the Earth is 88,553,040 miles from the Sun, and 91,562,816 at its furthest.
Its orbital circumference is 556,474,171 miles.
It orbits the Sun at an average speed of 17.9 miles per second (64,500mph)
It is inclined to the ecliptic at 23 degrees.....this gives us our seasons.
Its surface area = 307,059,491 miles²

This image of Earth is colour coded for Altitude from NOAA's National Geophysical Data Center .

Dark blue = < 5,000m

Green = Sea level

Red = > 3,000m

Grey = > 5,000m

The solar system that we live in lies in a very quiet neighbourhood. Not far beyond the orbit of Pluto lies the Kuiper belt, made up of rocky bodies left over from the formation of the solar system. Beyond here there really isn't much else for 24 trillion miles.

To get an idea of exactly how far away we are from anything else... try this:

If you were to reduce the distance of the nearest star (4.2 light years) to just 3,963 miles (Earth's radius) although the diameter of the solar system to scale would be a reasonable 1.15 miles in diameter, Earth would be just 2.08mm in diameter, while the Sun would be 22cm in diameter with the nearest object roughly 3cm in diameter, would be Proxima Centauri, nearly 3,963 miles away (with only the smallest of atomic particles in-between).

Lonely isn't it? If you think this is the nearest star, the furthest edge of the galaxy would be 75,485,714 miles away (roughly where the planet Mercury is).

This goes to show how HUGE the Galaxy is or how _small the Earth is, you choose!

How fast are we moving?

The Earth spins round once every 23hrs 56min 4.0953sec (to be exact)
It takes roughly 365 days to go around the Sun -> 556,474,171 miles
The Sun and therefore the Solar system travels around the Milky Way galaxy in 225 million years
The galaxy (and all other local galaxies) are moving toward the "great attractor" (galaxy supercluster) at 620 miles per second.

TOTAL = 2,797,000 mph

As hard as it might be to believe, right now while you are sitting at your computer reading this, you are moving at nearly 3 million mph.

This picture was named "the pale blue dot" by the late Carl Sagan.

This is where you live. From a distance of 3.7 billion miles the Voyager 2 probe turned around and photographed as many planets as it could. The one above is Earth, & It is clear to see that the image is less than 1 pixel in size. The voyager 2 probe left Earth on the 20^th August 1977, and even though it travelled at an average speed of 56,000mph, it completed it's journey in 1989, 12 years after it left. As of 9^th March 2001 the voyager 1 & 2 probes were 7,468,000,000 miles & 5,937,000,000 miles away respectively. These should not get to even the closest stars for around 60,000 years, and providing they don't get too close to a comet, extra-solar planet or star they should leave the galaxy in around 1 trillion years.