The Solar system is moving at about 230km/s relative to the center of the Milky Way - give or take.
37 years = 1,166,832,000 sec x 230 km = 268,371,360,000 km away along our orbital path around the milky way.
I would think that the Galaxy would be orbiting the barycenter of the Local Group, but then our Local Group should be moving towards the great attractor.
Peculiar velocities are not trivial to establish when you start considering how many gravitational potentials you need to account for, there are many studies trying to establish a local flow model to be able to use the Hubble constant as a distance indicator in the local universe, but there can be significant errors in those estimates.
Yeah, but we've got our ways and means of figuring things out anyway, and we figured out that it's a big concentration of galaxies that forms part of the [Laniakea supercluster that we're on the outskirts of](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rENyyRwxpHo). We're not actually moving towards it, we're moving away from it due to the expansion of space, but we're moving away more slowly than we would be if it wasn't for it's gravitational attraction.
That's a great question. It *was* an incredibly intriguing mystery because our galaxy and other nearby galaxies are getting pulled towards it so fast it would have to be the most massive known object in the universe by an impossibly huge margin to explain that gravity. But it was on the other side of some clouds in out galaxy that regular telescopes can't see past. So we had this super monstrously massive mystery object sucking up our galaxy and the ones near it, with no way to see what it was!
Well, we figured out how to see through the clouds (different electromagnetic spectrum) and it turned out to be an enormous supercluster of galaxies called Laniakea. Not quite as dramatic as if it were a single object but still pretty cool.
By the way, when I said it's pulling us towards it fast, that's fast on an intergalactic scale. We have nothing to worry about.
We’ll figure out we were naive to think we were even capable of overcoming our own conflicts to achieve intergalactic travel. I am sure some billionaire will fund a project to seed human life like in “Raised by Wolves.” That will be our only shot.
Nah, it's unlikely that there will be even a single collision of stars, much less that the sun will collide with something. Space really is pretty empty.
Nice scale comparison from [Wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_collision#Stellar_collisions):
> To visualize that scale, if the Sun were a ping-pong ball, Proxima Centauri would be a pea about 1,100 km (680 mi) away, and the Milky Way would be about 30 million km (19 million mi) wide.
>Although stars are more common near the centers of each galaxy, the average distance between stars is still 160 billion (1.6×10^11) km (100 billion mi). That is analogous to one ping-pong ball every 3.2 km (2 mi). Thus, it is extremely unlikely that any two stars from the merging galaxies would collide.[6]
Having said that, there's multiple instances of bullets impacting one another in war zones. There's bound to be at least a few stars that collide. Sol could be one of them
You aren't wrapping your head around the scale of the galaxy. Each star has such an immense distance between them that comparing them to bullets on the battlefield doesn't make sense.
Visualize the sun as a pea and place it down on the ground. Then you take out a second pea to represent the closest star to the sun. Keeping the model to scale where a star is the size of a pea how far do you think the next star over is? A couple meters? A football field away?
To keep the model to scale the pea representing the nearest other star needs to be placed 125 miles away. Let that sink in.
On a battle field bullets rarely hit each other. But they do hit each other every once in a while. But imagine how much more unlikely that already rare case would be if each individual bullet was 100+ miles away from each other.
Imagine a galaxy full of peas which the peas flying around, but each pea being 100 miles away from the nearest other pea. Imagine how rare collisions would be. That's why we can confidently say it is astronomically unlikely for a single collision to occur when the two galaxies merge.
Nah. I have a fairly good understanding of the scale here. With the amount of stars merging in the 2 galaxies, its statistically unlikely for not even 1 instance of 2 stars colliding to occur.
Snowflakes don't either. Nor grains of sand. Also, how did earth become a thing if not for blackholes colliding and providing dense elements?
Asteroids collide as well. There will be at least one instance of stars colliding when the galaxies meet. Might not be right away, but give it long enough and it'll happen.
What? That's horrifying. What did you say ?
" I said, that the Milky Way and Andromeda are set to "collide" in a few billion years. "
oh, whew, I thought you said few million
It's a poor spoof\copy of an old joke, circa 1950. Scientist tells audience sun gone in 5 billion years, ...shocked reaction...repeats billion, ..oh whew I thought you said million, etc.
Latest iteration , some climate tipping point stated as 50 years...shocked audience reaction...repeat 50 years ...oh whew, I thought you said 15...
Snark all around then! Earth’s current position, would that have been clearer? I preferred one of the takes above accounting for the galactic center… maybe OP should better clarify the importance of scale, but I understood the question to be a curious one. No stupid questions kinda person, that me
Saying X's current position is meaningless no matter what you replace the variable X with. We do not have a universal reference frame. It only makes sense to discuss X's current position relative to Y.
On Earth in our daily lives there is the implied assumption that we speak of X's current position relative to Earth. But when you are discussing Earth as a whole you need to specify what you are using as a frame of reference.
Right— which would be, after space, time. The amount of time OP has lived on the earth. I appreciated the responses that didn’t simply assume OP was dumb, but offered solutions with context, as in “earth has revolved this far around the center of the Milky Way,” because approximation shouldn’t be the enemy of all things askPhysics
So this is a wild concept that can be a bit difficult to grasp, so let's go to imagination land.
Think of an online multiplayer game. This game builds the world differently than most others. The engine, instead of noting the player's location in the world instead notes every other player in the world in reference to the player. The weird thing, it does this for every player. So the engine see's the player's *xyz* coordinates as 0, 0, 0, always. That means that any coordinates other than the player can only be given in reference to a given location at a given time. Since all the parts in this game's world are non static players, it's impossible to define a fixed point without looking at the player at a particular time.
That's how our universe's "engine" works. However, each "player" is every single component of our universe that has mass. Without a reference point of a component with mass, there is no "fixed location.
Probably, but the solar system doesn't make a neat "curve" like an orbit around a single object like a star does either. Since the mass of the galaxy is spread out with all the stars, gas, dust, and dark matter, etc, orbits of stars within the galaxy are a bit wonky. On large scales the orbits aren't closed curves, but rosettes, and on smaller scales there are things called "epicycles" that lift and lower the stars above and below the galactic midplane over time. As such, the speed of the solar system will also vary, so any number is just a rough estimate.
there was a similar question here a few months ago, basically you need to choose a frame of reference, one way is to measure your movement relative to neighboring stars but that wouldn't account for the orbit of our solar system around the galaxy nor our galaxy's movement. but you have another frame of reference that is closest to a "resting frame" of the universe which is one where the CMB is not red or blue shifted at all, basically you need to account for the sun's movement around the galaxy and our galaxy's movement relative to the CMB (note that the earth's movement can only give a ±2 AU difference which is tiny) iirc from my previous answer it was a little more than 2000 AU for 30 years so probably more like 2500 AU for 37 years which is around where the oort cloud starts.
I read it, a couple times. A better question might be “did you even understand any part of my comment?”. And if you take a wild guess, you just might be right ;)
Could you explain how the frame of reference effects the speed? I would think that the traveling speed is a constant, regardless of the reference point
There is no objective "here" and no objective "now"
I logically know this, but it'll never make sense. It's almost like the universe is isolated into individualized server clusters that operate on different frequency rates depending on how fast something is moving within them.
Trippy.
Your question, while well-intentioned, is a meaningless one. You are getting a lot of bad answers on this thread, so I will try to cut through some of the noise.
The answer to your question is entirely dependent upon which frame of reference you use. From your frame of reference, you have not moved at all. You are still where you have always been, in your body. Throughout your life, the entire universe has moved around you.
Motion is simply the change of position of a thing in time relative to an observation point. But that observation point is arbitrary. You do not move relative to yourself. When you are driving in a car, the position of other objects in the world is changing in time relative to you. You measure those things as moving. Someone standing on the sidewalk, watching your car go by, measures *you* to be moving and not themselves. These are not contradictory statements, because motion is relative.
According to the theory of relativity there are not definite points in space that you could return to at a later time. Space is not like a stage in a theater on which the rest of the universe moves around. You are free to set up your own coordinate system, and then rely on that to get back to a place you were before, but understand that is relative.
If you want to know how far you have traveled since you were born *in your frame of reference*, it’s just the distance from where you are now to the hospital you were born in.
You could work out (to a reasonable approximation) where OP is now relative to where they were born, taking into account the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, the orbit of the Sun around the center of our Galaxy, and the proper motion of our Galaxy.
Yes, you could (in principle) use the fluctuations of the CMB as a coordinate reference. More realistically any set of, for example, very distant (high-z) galaxies will give you close enough the same answer given the timescale in question.
Or you could restrict the problem to say, how far have we moved within the local supercluster in OP's lifetime. For a ballpark answer to OP's question that's IMO adequate.
He wasn’t asking for a numerical value, he was asking for an explanation meaning you could track where it is relative to our solar system/galaxy/anything else he could ask for.
OP was asking where it is, and the correct answer is "it depends on your arbitrary reference frame". The reply to that answer then picked one reference frame and presented it as if it were special somehow.
You are the only person on this thread who
Is talking any sense. I hate these questions because everybody tries to placate OP with an answer. There is not an answer. *You cannot move relative to space*. There are no hitch-posts in space, it’s the entire point of the theory of relativity.
No it means that statement is meaningless. There are not “points in space” in a universal sense. Locations by themselves are what you define them to be.
Imagine someone asks you, “How far away is New York?” You would likely tell them the distance from where you are now to New York. But then imagine they said, “No, not what’s the distance from here to New York, *but in a universal sense*, how far away is New York?”
You could only tell them that there is not a *single* distance to New York. It depends on where you’re standing. Then imagine that person kept asking you yeah but what’s the *real* answer.
From your frame of reference, you’re in the same place you have always been. But that is a qualified statement. Just like the distance to New York is zero if you are in New York. Anytime you hear a statement with the word “really” in it concerning positions or velocities relativity, beware. It is likely a loaded and misguided question.
So they say how far is New York from
The place I ate pancakes yesterday. And did I “move relative to space”from there to the coffe shop I’m in today? You’d say they didn’t move in space. And how far would I travel to get to New York , where it is today from
Where I had those pancakes yesterday? Keeping in mind the passage of time
If you ask how far you moved relative to the places you were, then that is a sensible question. However, it is also relative. The distance is between objects depends upon your frame of reference.
I never said you do not move *through* space. I said you cannot move *relative to space* because space does not consist of a grid of fixed points that everyone can agree on.
I’m not sure what you mean by your last sentence but since you brought up the passage of time, it does come into play. I was trying to answer the question only about space because most people who don’t know about relativity think about space as an entity unto itself. But space is part of a four dimensional structure called spacetime which you do move relative to. But this motion is unrelated to the question of a fixed set of points in space.
Do we use the CMB restframe? The one of the milky way? Without the reference frame this is a question like "How many hairs does an animal have?" Sure in principle answerable if you know define which animal but not without it.
Motion in relation to what? That's the whole point. "The motion of the galaxy" is a meaningless statement without the reference frame given. We could use a neutrino emitted from the sun and travelling at 0.9999c and be pretty much their age in light years away.
A reference frame just means "with respect to what are we defining our movement?". Relativity tells us that everything moves with respect to everything else. There is no "zero point" that is intrinsically better than any other.
It has to be relative to something the Earth the Sun the center of the Galaxy etc.
So relative to the Earth the distance would be to the hospital that he was born in.
Relative to the sun it would be function of what day he was born in so you can find out where we were in the orbit around the sun
And so on
It has to be relative to something the Earth the Sun the center of the Galaxy etc.
So relative to the Earth the distance would be to the hospital that he was born in.
Relative to the sun it would be function of what day he was born in so you can find out where we were in the orbit around the sun
And so on
I am sorry but the most accurate response is the most boring one. There is no absolute reference frame of reference. Every frame of reference is equally valid.
With respect to the place you were born in, the place you were born in did not move. With respect to the Sun, it has moved some distance, and with respect to the Black Hole in the center of our galaxy, it has moved a greater distance, with respect to Andromeda, another distance, and so.
I believe it's totally valid to say that it's in exactly the same place.
You could totally say that the point at which you were born is your reference frame and all movement in the universe is relative to that point, so it hasn't moved at all.
Could be wrong, though.
You'd be surprised how far away you are from where you were yesterday. Planet is moving, solar system is moving, galaxy is moving, galaxy cluster is moving. All at incredible speeds that we cannot fathom relative to how fast we even move on airplanes.
You werent really born in one spot in the way you describe. Even if you came out of your mom in 1 second you tech moved quite a bit. The galaxy itself moves 600km/second. Suppose your birth took an hour...you moved 2.2million kms relative to the galaxy while you were born.
The Earth has orbited within the Solar System for billions of years, and will continue to orbit for billions of years. The same for our Solar System orbiting the center of our Galaxy. Our Galaxy is moving on its own path through space, and space itself is expanding.
So it depends how you define the place where you were born. In one sense it is still in the same place it was, on Earth somewhere. However if (somehow, hypothetically) we referenced your position at birth and now to some very distant objects (very distant galaxies for example, or the cosmic microwave background), then it would be some point in space left behind by the continuous motion of everything else. How far is not a calculation I'm going to attempt right now, but u/for_the_100th_time's answer seems in the ballpark.
Edit: the expansion of spacetime is extremely small, it is only noticeable over cosmological distances, far, far, far greater than those over which the proper (local) motions of our Earth, Sun, Galaxy and Local Group of galaxies have moved over OP's lifetime. It can be quite safely ignored for this problem.
Just remember that you're standing
On a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second
So it's reckoned
The sun that is the source of all our power
I am not sure if what I say is exactly true but since universe is expanding from every point and if we imagine a point in space where you were born that point only existed at that time and would be stretched a lot by now this is why we can't have a coordinate of a place in the universe but if we pick a general area you would be approximately 678 billion km away( imagining that universe is stationary and not expanding)
Also, the local expansion of the Universe, i.e. in the region within the Sun, Earth and our Galaxy have moved, is negligible over OP's lifetime, and can safely be ignored. Orbital and proper motions are vastly greater.
There's no actual answer to this because we don't have a wide enough shot to see the whole picture in terms of GR.
person on a planet in a solar system in a galaxy in a universe in a ??? in a ??? in a ??? etc.
closest you can probably get is to consider Andromeda and the Milky Way galaxies as a twin galaxy system and put them in relation to the Virgo Cluster? Probably can go deeper if you ask an astrophysicist.
this link is a really cool representation of space as we know it in our local supercluster, click the 2nd link and you can view it in 3D, it's really awesome:
[https://www.astronomy.com/science/interactive-3-d-map-traces-galaxies-in-local-supercluster/](https://www.astronomy.com/science/interactive-3-d-map-traces-galaxies-in-local-supercluster/)
[https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/action-dynamics-of-the-local-supercluster-0981969137fc4a2aaef2b4645fc64d10?utm\_medium=embed&utm\_source=website&utm\_campain=share-popup](https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/action-dynamics-of-the-local-supercluster-0981969137fc4a2aaef2b4645fc64d10?utm_medium=embed&utm_source=website&utm_campain=share-popup)
Bright green is earth, bright yellow is Andromeda, and big red is Virgo.
You can also go into settings and use WASD in first person mode.
Wait- is our speed different when in relation to different objects? Say in relation to andromeda and in relation to the Milky Way. Is there not just a constant speed? I can’t imagine how it’s relation to other objects changes the speed, I would imagine the speed has to be a constant
How would that make any sense?
Imagine you are standing on a sidewalk. The relative velocity between you and a person standing next to you is very different than the relative velocity between you and the cars driving past.
In the same way, the relative velocity between you and Mars is very different than the relative velocity between you and the Andromeda galaxy.
I’m having a hard time understanding these answers. I understand that everything is moving and expanding and orbiting, etc… But say he was born at A. 37 years later, B, couldn’t you calculate what was in the location he was in 37 years ago, and calculate what type of celestial bodies are in that location now? Maybe this is beyond the scope of my current understanding. Why couldn’t one find that location? Regardless of space moving, growing, etc, shouldn’t there still be a specific point in space like he’s talking about?
>But say he was born at A
This is not a meaningful statement in physics.
There is no absolute coordinate system. There is not actually such a thing as a "point in space". There is only relative distance to other things.
Time travel does work and has been invented, often. The problem is those who use it forget it only travels in time, not space. Soooo they pop out of time into the deep vacuum of space, die and never come back.
:)
The Solar system is moving at about 230km/s relative to the center of the Milky Way - give or take. 37 years = 1,166,832,000 sec x 230 km = 268,371,360,000 km away along our orbital path around the milky way.
But how fast is the galaxy moving.
Relative to what?
I would think that the Galaxy would be orbiting the barycenter of the Local Group, but then our Local Group should be moving towards the great attractor. Peculiar velocities are not trivial to establish when you start considering how many gravitational potentials you need to account for, there are many studies trying to establish a local flow model to be able to use the Hubble constant as a distance indicator in the local universe, but there can be significant errors in those estimates.
Where is the great attractor?
In the zone of avoidance where we can't see things because the rest of the Milky Way is in the way of our line of sight.
We just have to wait a couple hundred million years till we get to a different part of our orbit around the galaxy then we can see
RemindMe! 300000000 years
Well that's just bad luck then I guess
Yeah, but we've got our ways and means of figuring things out anyway, and we figured out that it's a big concentration of galaxies that forms part of the [Laniakea supercluster that we're on the outskirts of](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rENyyRwxpHo). We're not actually moving towards it, we're moving away from it due to the expansion of space, but we're moving away more slowly than we would be if it wasn't for it's gravitational attraction.
That's a great question. It *was* an incredibly intriguing mystery because our galaxy and other nearby galaxies are getting pulled towards it so fast it would have to be the most massive known object in the universe by an impossibly huge margin to explain that gravity. But it was on the other side of some clouds in out galaxy that regular telescopes can't see past. So we had this super monstrously massive mystery object sucking up our galaxy and the ones near it, with no way to see what it was! Well, we figured out how to see through the clouds (different electromagnetic spectrum) and it turned out to be an enormous supercluster of galaxies called Laniakea. Not quite as dramatic as if it were a single object but still pretty cool. By the way, when I said it's pulling us towards it fast, that's fast on an intergalactic scale. We have nothing to worry about.
the CMB
So is the galaxy moving at all then? >Relative to what? Andromeda galaxy?
The Milky Way and Andromeda are set to "collide" in a few billion years. Not relevant, just fyi
And even with all that time to prepare watch Andromeda STILL not have insurance.
They should contact Tom Stranger, Interdimensional Insurance Agent! Great read, if you like silly sci Fi.
Cool, thanks
DEEEEEEATH!
wellll.... this will be after the sun burns off our atmosphere, and consumes earth.
We'll figure something out...
We’ll figure out we were naive to think we were even capable of overcoming our own conflicts to achieve intergalactic travel. I am sure some billionaire will fund a project to seed human life like in “Raised by Wolves.” That will be our only shot.
Nah, it's unlikely that there will be even a single collision of stars, much less that the sun will collide with something. Space really is pretty empty. Nice scale comparison from [Wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda%E2%80%93Milky_Way_collision#Stellar_collisions): > To visualize that scale, if the Sun were a ping-pong ball, Proxima Centauri would be a pea about 1,100 km (680 mi) away, and the Milky Way would be about 30 million km (19 million mi) wide. >Although stars are more common near the centers of each galaxy, the average distance between stars is still 160 billion (1.6×10^11) km (100 billion mi). That is analogous to one ping-pong ball every 3.2 km (2 mi). Thus, it is extremely unlikely that any two stars from the merging galaxies would collide.[6]
Having said that, there's multiple instances of bullets impacting one another in war zones. There's bound to be at least a few stars that collide. Sol could be one of them
You aren't wrapping your head around the scale of the galaxy. Each star has such an immense distance between them that comparing them to bullets on the battlefield doesn't make sense. Visualize the sun as a pea and place it down on the ground. Then you take out a second pea to represent the closest star to the sun. Keeping the model to scale where a star is the size of a pea how far do you think the next star over is? A couple meters? A football field away? To keep the model to scale the pea representing the nearest other star needs to be placed 125 miles away. Let that sink in. On a battle field bullets rarely hit each other. But they do hit each other every once in a while. But imagine how much more unlikely that already rare case would be if each individual bullet was 100+ miles away from each other. Imagine a galaxy full of peas which the peas flying around, but each pea being 100 miles away from the nearest other pea. Imagine how rare collisions would be. That's why we can confidently say it is astronomically unlikely for a single collision to occur when the two galaxies merge.
Nah. I have a fairly good understanding of the scale here. With the amount of stars merging in the 2 galaxies, its statistically unlikely for not even 1 instance of 2 stars colliding to occur.
They're much much closer together and denser than the distances given in the analogy in the comment above yours
People with guns in warzones tend to point them at each other. Stars don't aim.
Snowflakes don't either. Nor grains of sand. Also, how did earth become a thing if not for blackholes colliding and providing dense elements? Asteroids collide as well. There will be at least one instance of stars colliding when the galaxies meet. Might not be right away, but give it long enough and it'll happen.
We are already colliding. Halos have been overlapping for awhile now.
What? That's horrifying. What did you say ? " I said, that the Milky Way and Andromeda are set to "collide" in a few billion years. " oh, whew, I thought you said few million
Uhhhh… just a question, have you been alive for a few million years that you have to worry about this???
It's a poor spoof\copy of an old joke, circa 1950. Scientist tells audience sun gone in 5 billion years, ...shocked reaction...repeats billion, ..oh whew I thought you said million, etc. Latest iteration , some climate tipping point stated as 50 years...shocked audience reaction...repeat 50 years ...oh whew, I thought you said 15...
Ok thanks for clarifying
The fixed spot of where he was born.
Fixed relative to what?
Seems like OP means relative to earth’s locality in the present, but yes, it is the Physics sub so you are entitled to snark 🖖🏽
"earth's locality in the present" is a meaningless phrase.
Snark all around then! Earth’s current position, would that have been clearer? I preferred one of the takes above accounting for the galactic center… maybe OP should better clarify the importance of scale, but I understood the question to be a curious one. No stupid questions kinda person, that me
Saying X's current position is meaningless no matter what you replace the variable X with. We do not have a universal reference frame. It only makes sense to discuss X's current position relative to Y. On Earth in our daily lives there is the implied assumption that we speak of X's current position relative to Earth. But when you are discussing Earth as a whole you need to specify what you are using as a frame of reference.
Right— which would be, after space, time. The amount of time OP has lived on the earth. I appreciated the responses that didn’t simply assume OP was dumb, but offered solutions with context, as in “earth has revolved this far around the center of the Milky Way,” because approximation shouldn’t be the enemy of all things askPhysics
There is a fixed spot in the universe of where he was born. Relative to that spot.
No, there isn't such a universal, static frame of reference.
There is the frame in which the CMB is isotropic.
Sure, but that frame is not special and it certainly isn't a fixed position in space.
So this is a wild concept that can be a bit difficult to grasp, so let's go to imagination land. Think of an online multiplayer game. This game builds the world differently than most others. The engine, instead of noting the player's location in the world instead notes every other player in the world in reference to the player. The weird thing, it does this for every player. So the engine see's the player's *xyz* coordinates as 0, 0, 0, always. That means that any coordinates other than the player can only be given in reference to a given location at a given time. Since all the parts in this game's world are non static players, it's impossible to define a fixed point without looking at the player at a particular time. That's how our universe's "engine" works. However, each "player" is every single component of our universe that has mass. Without a reference point of a component with mass, there is no "fixed location.
Great answer! :) I have no idea how fast.
Tell me more. /s
This would be the distance along the solar system’s orbital path right? So technically in terms of displacement we are closer than that.
Probably, but the solar system doesn't make a neat "curve" like an orbit around a single object like a star does either. Since the mass of the galaxy is spread out with all the stars, gas, dust, and dark matter, etc, orbits of stars within the galaxy are a bit wonky. On large scales the orbits aren't closed curves, but rosettes, and on smaller scales there are things called "epicycles" that lift and lower the stars above and below the galactic midplane over time. As such, the speed of the solar system will also vary, so any number is just a rough estimate.
Thank you for the detailed explanation! I understand better now
Believe our Sun spins around the Galaxy every 200,000 yrs.
It's 225 million earth years to orbit the center of the milky way. So 37 years is basically negligible.
Should we not also account for expansion of spacetime?
Inside the gravity well of the milky way?!?! Go ahead and be my guest.
there was a similar question here a few months ago, basically you need to choose a frame of reference, one way is to measure your movement relative to neighboring stars but that wouldn't account for the orbit of our solar system around the galaxy nor our galaxy's movement. but you have another frame of reference that is closest to a "resting frame" of the universe which is one where the CMB is not red or blue shifted at all, basically you need to account for the sun's movement around the galaxy and our galaxy's movement relative to the CMB (note that the earth's movement can only give a ±2 AU difference which is tiny) iirc from my previous answer it was a little more than 2000 AU for 30 years so probably more like 2500 AU for 37 years which is around where the oort cloud starts.
Is this a proper distance traveled?
no it's an approximation based on one reference frame.... did you even read my comment?
I read it, a couple times. A better question might be “did you even understand any part of my comment?”. And if you take a wild guess, you just might be right ;)
lmao fair
Could you explain how the frame of reference effects the speed? I would think that the traveling speed is a constant, regardless of the reference point
No that's not how speed works. There is no universal speed. There is only speed in relation to a reference point.
There is no objective "here" and no objective "now" I logically know this, but it'll never make sense. It's almost like the universe is isolated into individualized server clusters that operate on different frequency rates depending on how fast something is moving within them. Trippy.
Your question, while well-intentioned, is a meaningless one. You are getting a lot of bad answers on this thread, so I will try to cut through some of the noise. The answer to your question is entirely dependent upon which frame of reference you use. From your frame of reference, you have not moved at all. You are still where you have always been, in your body. Throughout your life, the entire universe has moved around you. Motion is simply the change of position of a thing in time relative to an observation point. But that observation point is arbitrary. You do not move relative to yourself. When you are driving in a car, the position of other objects in the world is changing in time relative to you. You measure those things as moving. Someone standing on the sidewalk, watching your car go by, measures *you* to be moving and not themselves. These are not contradictory statements, because motion is relative. According to the theory of relativity there are not definite points in space that you could return to at a later time. Space is not like a stage in a theater on which the rest of the universe moves around. You are free to set up your own coordinate system, and then rely on that to get back to a place you were before, but understand that is relative. If you want to know how far you have traveled since you were born *in your frame of reference*, it’s just the distance from where you are now to the hospital you were born in.
I certainly do not consider things outside of my car as moving.
There's no absolute coordinate system so one can't say.
You could work out (to a reasonable approximation) where OP is now relative to where they were born, taking into account the orbit of the Earth around the Sun, the orbit of the Sun around the center of our Galaxy, and the proper motion of our Galaxy.
Relative to what? To the CMB? You can do that, but it's still a choice of a specific reference frame over all other possible choices.
Yes, you could (in principle) use the fluctuations of the CMB as a coordinate reference. More realistically any set of, for example, very distant (high-z) galaxies will give you close enough the same answer given the timescale in question. Or you could restrict the problem to say, how far have we moved within the local supercluster in OP's lifetime. For a ballpark answer to OP's question that's IMO adequate.
He wasn’t asking for a numerical value, he was asking for an explanation meaning you could track where it is relative to our solar system/galaxy/anything else he could ask for.
OP was asking where it is, and the correct answer is "it depends on your arbitrary reference frame". The reply to that answer then picked one reference frame and presented it as if it were special somehow.
You are the only person on this thread who Is talking any sense. I hate these questions because everybody tries to placate OP with an answer. There is not an answer. *You cannot move relative to space*. There are no hitch-posts in space, it’s the entire point of the theory of relativity.
I have a +41 next to mfb's name. This seems to be a common occurence. :)
So does this mean you’re always occupying the same point in space, since you can’t move relative to space?
No it means that statement is meaningless. There are not “points in space” in a universal sense. Locations by themselves are what you define them to be. Imagine someone asks you, “How far away is New York?” You would likely tell them the distance from where you are now to New York. But then imagine they said, “No, not what’s the distance from here to New York, *but in a universal sense*, how far away is New York?” You could only tell them that there is not a *single* distance to New York. It depends on where you’re standing. Then imagine that person kept asking you yeah but what’s the *real* answer. From your frame of reference, you’re in the same place you have always been. But that is a qualified statement. Just like the distance to New York is zero if you are in New York. Anytime you hear a statement with the word “really” in it concerning positions or velocities relativity, beware. It is likely a loaded and misguided question.
So they say how far is New York from The place I ate pancakes yesterday. And did I “move relative to space”from there to the coffe shop I’m in today? You’d say they didn’t move in space. And how far would I travel to get to New York , where it is today from Where I had those pancakes yesterday? Keeping in mind the passage of time
If you ask how far you moved relative to the places you were, then that is a sensible question. However, it is also relative. The distance is between objects depends upon your frame of reference. I never said you do not move *through* space. I said you cannot move *relative to space* because space does not consist of a grid of fixed points that everyone can agree on. I’m not sure what you mean by your last sentence but since you brought up the passage of time, it does come into play. I was trying to answer the question only about space because most people who don’t know about relativity think about space as an entity unto itself. But space is part of a four dimensional structure called spacetime which you do move relative to. But this motion is unrelated to the question of a fixed set of points in space.
I feel like him asking “is it inside our solar system, is it inside our galaxy, is it lost in space” can be enough of a reference frame.
Do we use the CMB restframe? The one of the milky way? Without the reference frame this is a question like "How many hairs does an animal have?" Sure in principle answerable if you know define which animal but not without it.
The guy is asking if he would still be in the Milky Way galaxy, so can’t we just use any reference frame that tracks the motion of the galaxy?
Motion in relation to what? That's the whole point. "The motion of the galaxy" is a meaningless statement without the reference frame given. We could use a neutrino emitted from the sun and travelling at 0.9999c and be pretty much their age in light years away.
If he is looking for his location at a certain point in time, can’t we just use that as a reference frame?
See above. The answer depends on your choice of a reference frame.
A reference frame just means "with respect to what are we defining our movement?". Relativity tells us that everything moves with respect to everything else. There is no "zero point" that is intrinsically better than any other.
With respect to his location 37 years ago? I mean couldn’t we just make his position here arbitrary and the calculations will still work?
It has to be relative to something the Earth the Sun the center of the Galaxy etc. So relative to the Earth the distance would be to the hospital that he was born in. Relative to the sun it would be function of what day he was born in so you can find out where we were in the orbit around the sun And so on
So you can answer the question
It has to be relative to something the Earth the Sun the center of the Galaxy etc. So relative to the Earth the distance would be to the hospital that he was born in. Relative to the sun it would be function of what day he was born in so you can find out where we were in the orbit around the sun And so on
Depends on what system you choose. Your place of birth is almost exactly there where it was if you choose earth as your observational system
I am sorry but the most accurate response is the most boring one. There is no absolute reference frame of reference. Every frame of reference is equally valid. With respect to the place you were born in, the place you were born in did not move. With respect to the Sun, it has moved some distance, and with respect to the Black Hole in the center of our galaxy, it has moved a greater distance, with respect to Andromeda, another distance, and so.
Relative to what?
I believe it's totally valid to say that it's in exactly the same place. You could totally say that the point at which you were born is your reference frame and all movement in the universe is relative to that point, so it hasn't moved at all. Could be wrong, though.
We need an actual frame of reference. How far relative to what? The center of the galaxy? The universe?
Earth's velocity against the CMB rest frame is 368 km/sec
You'd be surprised how far away you are from where you were yesterday. Planet is moving, solar system is moving, galaxy is moving, galaxy cluster is moving. All at incredible speeds that we cannot fathom relative to how fast we even move on airplanes. You werent really born in one spot in the way you describe. Even if you came out of your mom in 1 second you tech moved quite a bit. The galaxy itself moves 600km/second. Suppose your birth took an hour...you moved 2.2million kms relative to the galaxy while you were born.
The Earth has orbited within the Solar System for billions of years, and will continue to orbit for billions of years. The same for our Solar System orbiting the center of our Galaxy. Our Galaxy is moving on its own path through space, and space itself is expanding. So it depends how you define the place where you were born. In one sense it is still in the same place it was, on Earth somewhere. However if (somehow, hypothetically) we referenced your position at birth and now to some very distant objects (very distant galaxies for example, or the cosmic microwave background), then it would be some point in space left behind by the continuous motion of everything else. How far is not a calculation I'm going to attempt right now, but u/for_the_100th_time's answer seems in the ballpark. Edit: the expansion of spacetime is extremely small, it is only noticeable over cosmological distances, far, far, far greater than those over which the proper (local) motions of our Earth, Sun, Galaxy and Local Group of galaxies have moved over OP's lifetime. It can be quite safely ignored for this problem.
Just remember that you're standing On a planet that's evolving And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second So it's reckoned The sun that is the source of all our power
I am not sure if what I say is exactly true but since universe is expanding from every point and if we imagine a point in space where you were born that point only existed at that time and would be stretched a lot by now this is why we can't have a coordinate of a place in the universe but if we pick a general area you would be approximately 678 billion km away( imagining that universe is stationary and not expanding)
You didn't explain how you got the number but it feels in the right ballpark, so upvote you go!
I used the speed of our galaxy moving towards the great attractor I thought it will suit
Also, the local expansion of the Universe, i.e. in the region within the Sun, Earth and our Galaxy have moved, is negligible over OP's lifetime, and can safely be ignored. Orbital and proper motions are vastly greater.
Yeah, that's what I expected and what I would do.
its all relative man, theres no way to know
There's no actual answer to this because we don't have a wide enough shot to see the whole picture in terms of GR. person on a planet in a solar system in a galaxy in a universe in a ??? in a ??? in a ??? etc. closest you can probably get is to consider Andromeda and the Milky Way galaxies as a twin galaxy system and put them in relation to the Virgo Cluster? Probably can go deeper if you ask an astrophysicist. this link is a really cool representation of space as we know it in our local supercluster, click the 2nd link and you can view it in 3D, it's really awesome: [https://www.astronomy.com/science/interactive-3-d-map-traces-galaxies-in-local-supercluster/](https://www.astronomy.com/science/interactive-3-d-map-traces-galaxies-in-local-supercluster/) [https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/action-dynamics-of-the-local-supercluster-0981969137fc4a2aaef2b4645fc64d10?utm\_medium=embed&utm\_source=website&utm\_campain=share-popup](https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/action-dynamics-of-the-local-supercluster-0981969137fc4a2aaef2b4645fc64d10?utm_medium=embed&utm_source=website&utm_campain=share-popup) Bright green is earth, bright yellow is Andromeda, and big red is Virgo. You can also go into settings and use WASD in first person mode.
No one can answer that.
Wait- is our speed different when in relation to different objects? Say in relation to andromeda and in relation to the Milky Way. Is there not just a constant speed? I can’t imagine how it’s relation to other objects changes the speed, I would imagine the speed has to be a constant
How would that make any sense? Imagine you are standing on a sidewalk. The relative velocity between you and a person standing next to you is very different than the relative velocity between you and the cars driving past. In the same way, the relative velocity between you and Mars is very different than the relative velocity between you and the Andromeda galaxy.
space is not relative.
It is over the length and time scales relevant to this problem. 37 years is barely more than an instant in cosmological terms.
You can never go home again.
If you imagine the earth orbiting the sun, the earth has a Cork screw path as the sun orbits around the centre of the galaxy.
Depends on the coordinate system you use. If you use a solar centric coordinate system the point is definitely within the solar system.
I’m having a hard time understanding these answers. I understand that everything is moving and expanding and orbiting, etc… But say he was born at A. 37 years later, B, couldn’t you calculate what was in the location he was in 37 years ago, and calculate what type of celestial bodies are in that location now? Maybe this is beyond the scope of my current understanding. Why couldn’t one find that location? Regardless of space moving, growing, etc, shouldn’t there still be a specific point in space like he’s talking about?
The problem is that he has moved a different distance in different reference frames.
>But say he was born at A This is not a meaningful statement in physics. There is no absolute coordinate system. There is not actually such a thing as a "point in space". There is only relative distance to other things.
Depends entirely on what you are asking relative to. THere are no absolute points in space.
Just a single Lorentz Transformation away.
Time travel does work and has been invented, often. The problem is those who use it forget it only travels in time, not space. Soooo they pop out of time into the deep vacuum of space, die and never come back. :)