Earth’s average orbital speed is about 30 kilometers per second. In other units, that’s about 19 miles per second, or 67,000 miles per hour, or 110,000 kilometers per hour (110 million meters per hour).
Let’s calculate that. First of all we know that in general, the distance you travel equals the speed at which you travel multiplied by the time (duration) of travel. If we reverse that, we get that the average speed is equal to the distance traveled over the time taken.
We also know that the time it takes for the Earth to go once around the Sun is one year. So, in order to know the speed, we just have to figure out the distance traveled by the Earth when it goes once around the Sun. To do that we will assume that the orbit of the Earth is circular (which is not exactly right, it is more like an ellipse, but for our purpose a circle is close enough). So the distance traveled in one year is just the circumference of the circle. (Remember, the circumference of a circle is equal to 2×?×radius.)
The average distance from the Earth to the Sun is about 149,600,000 km. (Astronomers call this an astronomical unit, or AU for short.) Therefore, in one year, the Earth travels a distance of 2×?×(149,600,000 km). This means that the speed is about:
speed = 2×?×(149,600,000 km)/(1 year)
and if we convert that to more meaningful units (knowing that there are, on average, about 365.25 days in a year, and 24 hours per day) we get:
speed = 107,000 km/h (or, if you prefer, 67,000 miles per hour)
So the Earth moves at about 110,000 km/h around the Sun (which is about one thousand times faster than the typical speed of a car on a highway!)
Credit: Ask an Astronomer
Picture credit: Google
