Earth's Journey Through Space

So thinking about moss and why one might judge direction based on where the sun is shining made me think of the Sun, the Earth's tilt, and the seasons again; so I started researching it, since I still didn't feel very confident on the explanation of the Earth's tilt in relation to seasons. I had to visually see it in motion to grasp the idea, so I looked up some videos. This particular one made it click for me. The smaller square on the bottom left shows the Earth on its axis as it orbits the Sun. By visually seeing this phenomenon rather than trying to visualize it in my head, I was able to better understand the process. 

While I was watching this video, I started thinking about the way our solar system sort of spirals through space around the center of the galaxy. I had never really thought about it like that before. From seeing diagrams in books, I had usually pictured the solar system orbiting the Sun like on a flat plane (hmm...like how they used to think the Earth was flat), so I did some more research and found this video on Youtube. There might be some misconceptions in this video, but I liked this 3-D way of looking at it. If you watch it, watch it until the end. It gets a little repetitive, but how it ties in at the end is eye-opening. The helical motion of Earth going around the Sun mirrors life on Earth, from the pattern of a flower to a seashell to our DNA!!! Think about the seashell exercise we did in class, and how some of the seashells had spiral, or helical patterns, like the Earth's path and the shape of our galaxy!

This got me thinking about how fast the Earth is really travelling. We usually think of the Earth as travelling at the speed it takes it to revolve around the Sun, which pretty much takes a year. But what about the speed that the Sun along with our solar system is travelling around the center of the Milky Way galaxy? This is called a cosmic year. A cosmic year is about 225-250 million years! The Earth is travelling around the galaxy at 500,000 miles an hour!!! Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is 100,000 light years across! And that's just one galaxy part of clusters upon clusters of galaxies!

Earthsky.org

References:
Earthsky. (2014, January 6). Retrieved from: http://www.earthsky.org

Kurdistan Planetarium. (2008, December 2).Earth Rotation and Revolution Around a Moving Sun. Rettrieved from: https://www.youtube.com

DjSadhu. (2012, August. 24). The Helical Model-Our Solar System is A Vortex. Retrieved from: https://youtube.com