How Fast Are You Moving Right Now?

Space · Animated Explainer · ~50 seconds

Sit still and you're still moving — fast. A zoom-out through every nested frame of motion, then the honest twist: your true speed through the universe.

▶ Premiering soon on Instagram & YouTube

The story

Sit perfectly still and you are still moving — fast. The Earth spins beneath you at about 1,670 km/h. It orbits the Sun at 107,000 km/h. The Sun drags the whole solar system around the galaxy at 828,000 km/h. And the galaxy itself is falling through space toward the Great Attractor at over two million km/h. The video zooms out through each of these nested frames, stacking the speeds into a running total.

Then comes the honest twist: those motions all point in different directions, so you can't simply add them up. Done properly — as a vector sum — they partly cancel, and your true speed through the universe is about 1.3 million km/h (369 km/s), measured directly from the Cosmic Microwave Background, the leftover glow of the Big Bang. Your real heading: toward the constellation Leo.

Sources: Standard values for Earth's rotation and orbit and the Sun's galactic velocity; net velocity relative to the CMB rest frame from the Planck satellite's measured dipole (≈369 km/s for the Sun).