Does the sun move ?

[alxian]

i prefer the idea that the mystery body in the quiper belt is a planet.

 

if you have a star out there wouldn't it melt the ice balls and purturb their orbits more frequently?

 

the further out you go of course the less likely such interactions are but if one day a new comet appears out of nowhere and we extrapolate its path back would it not be possible to find that body that send it shooting inwards?

[Freethinker]

Everything revolves around my, er, "member". I have a pair of boxers that say so with arrows to prove it.

 

And while many may disagree, no one could prove it wrong.

[Pyrotex]

our velocity can even be whatever you like, between zero and almost c, in whichever direction you like! :eek2:

 

Well... no.

When we look at the background infrared radiation from the farthest reaches of the Cosmos, (besides ads for Coca-Cola :QuestionM ) we find we can measure 'our' personal velocity relative to that background radiation. In one direction, it is ever so slightly red-shifted. In the 180-degree other direction, it is equally blue-shifted.

 

I wish I could remember the details, but I think our total velocity is in the hundreds of miles per second. Of course, this ASSUMES that the Big Bang was symetric in all directions and that it wasn't "moving" relative to the "nothing" that was (not really) there before it went "Bang". But these assumptions appear non-controversial.

[rockytriton]

maybe the sun is absolutely still and the whole universe moves according to it.

[Pyrotex]

maybe the sun is absolutely still and the whole universe moves according to it.

 

:QuestionM Only someone who has been at the Antarctic waaaay too long, staring at all the stars rotating around his own personal self, would say something like that. :eek2:

[rockytriton]

Yes, it must be the heat getting to my head

[Turtle]

Because it's a gang-bang, with turtles all the way down! :eek:

:eek: We turtles have a lot more on our minds than sex; in fact, it is way down the stack of priorities.

___The original question is rather silly inasmuch as everything moves whether the movement is apparent or not. :evil:

[lindagarrette]

The earth moves, the sun moves, the galaxy moves, the cluster moves, and there are some foamy like things out there that also move, at least in relation to each other. In that hierarchy of motion, as a person standing on the surface of the earth, what is our relative velocity through space? The speed is not the same, since most objects rotate around some central point. I assume the actual speed is the rate of expansion.

[Pyrotex]

With which other star? Alpha centauri?

 

I really don't think it would have so far escaped notice.

 

Alpha Cen is about 4.6 lightyears (LY) away, so if our sun and Alpha Cen were rotating about a common center of mass (which is what planets and stars do), our speed would be measured in a few meters per second or perhaps even a fraction of one meter per second. That would be very hard to notice.

 

Trouble is, as crowded as the galaxy is out here (one star every 8 to 10 LY on average) such a large orbit would be very temporary as other stars would interfere. So we probably don't rotate around Alpha Cen.

 

We DO rotate around the center of the Milky Way galaxy (which is near the spout of the "Teapot" of Sagitarius). That takes 250 million years per orbit, if I remember correctly.