But not all ellipses come in the same shape. One of Kepler's laws describing planetary motions states that all orbits are ellipses. This is in fact a very good approximation. The only approximation I did in the calculation I sent you is assuming that the orbit of the Earth is circular. In the case of your question about the speed of the Earth around the Sun, there isn't really a more 'precise' answer. Thanks for your explanation, but I was hoping for an explanation a little more precise, since I already knew the one you gave. 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!) Speed = 107,000 km/h (or, if you prefer, 67,000 miles per hour) This means that the speed is about:Īnd 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: (Astronomers call this an astronomical unit, or AU for short.) Therefore, in one year, the Earth travels a distance of 2×π×(149,600,000 km). The average distance from the Earth to the Sun is about 149,600,000 km.
(Remember, the circumference of a circle is equal to 2×π×radius.) So the distance traveled in one year is just the circumference of the circle. 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, 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. We also know that the time it takes for the Earth to go once around the Sun is one year. If we reverse that, we get that the average speed is equal to the distance traveled over the time taken. 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. 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). Short version: Earth's average orbital speed is about 30 kilometers per second.
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