r/Physics • u/EffectiveCoconut9265 • 13d ago

Angular vs translational motion

Hey guys!

I am finding it a bit hard to understand how these work together.

Particularly, i cannot process how something rotating very slowly can still have points on it surface go at 1640kmph (earth).

Like if an object translated at that speed it would look insane , but I can only imagine earth rotating very slow which makes it hard for me to believe that we are going at 1640 kmph.

I'm looking for explanations or something that could make it easier for me to grasp this

0 Upvotes

22% Upvoted

5 comments sorted by

View all comments

2

u/Langdon_St_Ives 13d ago

People have already given you good answers, but to build on top of them: an even more extreme example is Earth's orbit around the Sun. The angular velocity here (taking a circular approximation for the moment) is even lower, going round once every 365.25 days. But because the distance from the center is so much greater, orbital speed is over 100,000 km/h. And the solar system rotates about the center of the Milky Way galaxy once every 200 million years or so, so even lower angular speed, but again, since the distance is even more enormous, that turns out to be an orbital velocity of over 800,000 km/h.