Tuesday 10 May 2011

galactic dynamics - Leaving the Milky Way

Not really, for the same reason that you cannot travel west by jumping up in the air and let Earth rotate underneath you, such that you land a little farther to the west.



The reason is that standing on Earth's surface, you already have a velocity toward the east which matches exactly the speed of the surface. Thus, in the reference frame of Earth, you simply jump up and down.



In the same manner, if you use your mad hypothetical spacecraft to fly "up", i.e. away from the Galactic plane, you already have a velocity of $sim$250 km s$^{-1}$ in the direction of the rotation of the plane, so that in the reference frame of the plane, you simply fly straight up.



Apart from this, in order to leave the Galactic plane, you need to fly roughly 500 lightyears. This will take a long time. You should stay home.

No comments:

Post a Comment