The world and humans for students and their parents

How did the planet Earth come about?

From the book by Andrey Sokolov and Tatiana Sokolova "The world and humans for students and their parents".

How did the planet Earth come about?

Long, long time ago. Almost 14 billion years ago, something happened that scientists call the Big Bang.

This was no ordinary explosion. After all, usually the explosion destroys. But the Big Bang created our Universe.

How this could have happened, no one knows for sure yet. We cannot look so deeply into the past. But there are assumptions.

Scientists believe that our entire Universe arose from something extremely small and dense. It hatched out of this egg and turned into something incredibly huge.

First, after the Big Bang, a very, very hot fog formed. Expanding, creating time and space, this fog gradually cooled down and atoms began to appear in it - the smallest particles from which everything that we can see around us is created.

In the fog that arose after the Big Bang, everything spun at tremendous speeds. As a result of these processes, about 400 million years after the Big Bang, the first stars appeared.

After some time, these first stars exploded and the Universe familiar to us, galaxies and stars familiar to us from the night sky began to form from their fragments and atoms.

It is most convenient to view the Universe at night.

Of course, it will not be possible to consider everything, but a small piece is quite. And this tiny part visible to us is the whole starry sky.

But if you take a telescope, you can see a larger area. And if you take the most powerful telescope that scientists have, you can see a lot in the Universe. But not all. Not a single scientist has yet managed to see the entire Universe, it is so huge.

In this vast Universe, in a whirlwind of collisions, spinning and merging, the Milky Way galaxy was formed about 13 and a half billion years ago. One of the 2 trillion other galaxies in the Universe.

The Milky Way galaxy itself consists of either 200 or 400 billion stars, scientists have not yet had time to count their number. And one of these stars is our Sun.

The sun is much younger than the Milky Way galaxy. It appeared 4 and a half billion years ago.

After the emergence of the sun, the planets of the solar system arose from cosmic dust, gas, atoms and debris of various celestial bodies that revolved around the sun.

The formation of planets and stars in the Universe follows the same principle. Light particles are attracted to heavy ones, merge with them, become compacted, pressed. All this happens at great speeds.

It seems to us that we are sitting on the sofa and calmly reading a book, but in fact, at this time we are rushing in orbit around the Sun at a speed of more than 100 thousand kilometers per hour, i.e. we fly about 30 kilometers in a second. Together. All people, animals, houses and the Earth itself.

(For comparison. When we are in a hurry to get somewhere, but we are walking, our speed is only 5 kilometers per hour, and when we drive around the city by car, then 50 kilometers per hour, of course, if we do not break the rules.)

But that is not all. Since the Earth rotates not only around the Sun, but also around its axis, we move from sunrise to sunset at a speed of 300 to 1674 kilometers per hour, depending on where our sofa is located on which we read book.

If our sofa is on a beach in the country of Ecuador, then we will move from sunrise to sunset at a speed of 1674 kilometers per hour, and if not far from the North Pole, then 300 kilometers per hour. If our sofa is located in Europe, then the speed with which it moves from sunrise to sunset will be 1000-1200 kilometers per hour.

But that's not all. Even in a dream, we are moving not only from dusk to dawn, not only are we rushing at a speed of 30 kilometers per second around the Sun, we are still racing through our Milky Way galaxy, along with the entire solar system at a speed of more than 200 kilometers per second (or more than 70 thousand kilometers per hour).

But not only the Earth rotates around its axis and around the Sun. Not only is the solar system inside the galaxy, the Milky Way galaxy itself rotates. And this speed is about 900 thousand kilometers per hour. But the galaxy not only rotates, but also moves in space, along with all its stars, stellar systems, our solar system and the Earth at a speed of more than 400 thousand kilometers per hour.

The stars and galaxies surrounding us and our galaxy are also continuously moving and rotating in space. And relative to each star or galaxy, we move on our couch at different speeds, like cars on the road, cyclists in the yard or football players on the field. Sometimes the speeds double when galaxies are moving towards each other. Sometimes they decrease if they move one after another or from each other.

So no matter how calmly we sit during the lesson, we rush through space with great speed. And we are also told "do not fidget." But what is “fidgeting”. This is a few centimeters per second. Does this really compare to at least 30 kilometers per second, with which our chair and desk move around the Sun.