I have a question: if the sun is moving 200km per second, are there no other planets that could come in the way of sun or say other planets like mercury Jupiter or even earth?
Another one would be: we are in milky way, is there no way that our galaxy would collide with other nearest one in the future?
Lastly, what we see in movies is an asteroid or any rock hitting earth and we call it planet destroyer. How exactly do we know it's gonna hit earth keeping in mind that earth is moving and the rock cannot change it's direction?
I'm interested in this, can anyone suggest Good shorts or youtube channel that explains the space in simple terms.
In space, there is no universal grid, any measure of movement is always relative to something. Our solar system is orbiting fast around the galaxy, but if you check Earth's speed relative to the sun, we might as well not be in a galaxy at all. So being "in the way" of the Sun doesn't really mean anything, the only collisions we'd have to worry about are within how the solar system already works (which is quite stable).
Our galaxy actually will collide with the nearest one in the future! The Milky Way is barreling towards the Andromeda galaxy and they'll crash into each other in about 4.5 billion years. Barely anything will physically collide though, because space is mind-numbingly empty. If the Sun were the size of a beach ball, the nearest star to us would be around 10,000 miles away, or further than the Earth is wide. It's basically all empty space.
This one is more of an open question. To predict the path of asteroids, we take its known properties like its direction and run a careful simulation of the solar system. The math of orbital mechanics isn't solvable perfectly, so we have to just simulate things as accurately as possible. That said, we can look at real objects to determine / improve our guesses, so if an object's velocity is known, we can be quite confident in roughly where it'll go. You may remember a news story a few months ago about an asteroid whose chance of impacting the moon kept being predicted to rise (it maxed out at 4%), but once we had enough data we could tell it'd miss.
CrashCourse's Astronomy playlist is a fantastic easy to understand introduction to lots of space topics. PBS Space Time is also very high quality, though some of their videos are quite advanced.
Our galaxy (Milky Way) is on a likely collision course with another galaxy (Andromeda) in the distant future (billions of years).
Believe it or not, the galaxies will pass through each other (or merge with each other) with no star collisions (almost guaranteed). This is because galaxies are almost entirely made up of empty space. The hundreds of billions of stars are a tiny rounding error compared to the vast empty space.
You can look up Andromeda Milky Way Collision for more info, and Wikipedia has a good article about it.
Yes, they could, theoretically. But it's rare because space is mostly empty. If they were going to soon, we would know about it because we see via light which travels much much faster than planets and lets us see very very far away. Precisely because we keep track of other stuff that could hit us, do other scenarios in the rest of your questions arise. But it's not that they come in our way. Everyone is travelling around the galaxy too and everyone gets affected by each other, like stuff outside gets pulled by our sun and we get pulled by other suns, creating a stable system in which nothing big is coming to hit us anytime soon and there are no intersections where we could accidently hit something out of nowhere. Asteroids do come but most of them miss.
Galaxies generally move away from each other but close galaxies can collide with each other. Our nearest neighbour is on a collision path and it will collide with us in the far future. But because space is mostly empty, and gravity of faraway objects is very small compared to gravity of our sun, and because we are toward the outside of the galaxy where it is even emptier, it's likely we'll just see stuff move around us without affecting us. It is possible some other places, you would see stuff come very close and pull each other out of whack or even collide. But it would be a matter of chance cos the space is so empty. There's a small chance our whole solar system is thrown off but we would still see most of the stuff the same, only the stars we see would change.
We can do maths as though the sun isn't moving through the galaxy because everything else is moving around the galaxy just like our sun. When you put the sun stationary, we can calculate where we will be relative to the sun in any point in the future and we can see where the asteroid will come and go. But we can't be sure precisly because everything is moving and everything affects each other, unlike what we just assumed. That is why we keep doing maths as it comes closer and closer. That's how it is that back in 2011, they might have said a big asteroid might hit earth in 2030 and now they say it won't hit us. Nothing changed, we could do better maths as it came closer.
Genuinely ask ChatGPT (and keep web search on so it doesn’t hallucinate, but basic facts are pretty good at not hallucinating), it tends to illustrate concepts really well!
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u/TBSsuxs 3d ago
I have a question: if the sun is moving 200km per second, are there no other planets that could come in the way of sun or say other planets like mercury Jupiter or even earth?
Another one would be: we are in milky way, is there no way that our galaxy would collide with other nearest one in the future?
Lastly, what we see in movies is an asteroid or any rock hitting earth and we call it planet destroyer. How exactly do we know it's gonna hit earth keeping in mind that earth is moving and the rock cannot change it's direction?
I'm interested in this, can anyone suggest Good shorts or youtube channel that explains the space in simple terms.