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Is there an app or some technology that can tell us which way we are moving?

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Rick Law:

--- Quote from: Beamin on December 11, 2020, 01:18:14 am ---Both novel and technical.

Say we are spinning around the earth
Earth around sun
Sun around milkyway
Milkyway around local group
group around cluster
cluster around super cluster
super cluster relative to CMB or latest map of observable universe.

Would be cool to have an app on your phone that used the gps and compass to tell you which on these scales you were actually moving and how fast. Yes I realize all motion is relative to the observer and we are always at the center but ... I always wanted an arrow and a speedometer to tell me how fast im moving. Sure the earth's rotation of great speed is nothing compared to the earth moving around the milky way or moving toward the great attracter sloan wall... How many miles did I move since I started typing?

--- End quote ---

We don't know enough to know where we are heading and how fast.

Even within our local group, things are uncertain and disputed.  We cannot say for sure how we are moving.  While the "main stream" astrophysicist adopted "dark matter" and "dark energy" as today's standard model, their existence is actually disputed by some reputable physicist.

While explanation is disputed, it is however commonly accepted that large portion of the observable universe appears to be moving in a specific direction relative to the CMB.  It may be some source of force outside our observable universe pulling/pushing things in a way that we don't know, or,  it may be our "standard model" being incorrect.  No one knows "for sure."

I wonder if our civilization will exist long enough for us to find out...

Beamin:

--- Quote from: AntiProtonBoy on December 11, 2020, 10:16:47 am ---This reminds of a cool story. My old boss had a colleague who used to work on early head mounted displays in the 90s. The prototype used laser interferometry via fibre optic cable loops to track delta movements. It was super accurate and had a very fast update time. But there was one problem. They kept seeing a constant drift, which they could not account for. After laboriously debugging the system, they realised the drift was attributed the motion of Earth in space, ie. rotation, and (I think) also orbiting around the sun. How freaky is that?

--- End quote ---

How exactly did that work was it like a laser ring gyroscope? Sounds fascinating.

What I have been looking for was an app on your phone that took into account time date and GPS and would show you an arrow preferably overlaid with what your phones camera sees (pokemango style) to show you what direction and you speed you are going relative to the CMB dipole or other super large scale universe object. Even a computer based app where you told it how many degrees your monitor is facing then draw an arrow on the screen. I wish I could write code I would imagine a software engineer could write the code in a few hours.

Reading those forbes articles it said
--- Quote ---Our Sun's peculiar motion of 368 km/s, and our local group's, of 627 km/s, matches up perfectly with how we understand that all galaxies move through space.
--- End quote ---
So is our speed 995 km/s? Or are those at angles, or even 180' away from each other; = motion is between 259 and 995km/h?
This what keeps me from making my time machine and making sure I dont return in space or in the center  of the earth, a very practical use case for this number.

Rick Law:

--- Quote from: Beamin on January 01, 2021, 01:06:41 pm ---
What I have been looking for was an app on your phone that took into account time date and GPS and would show you an arrow preferably overlaid with what your phones camera sees (pokemango style) to show you what direction and you speed you are going relative to the CMB dipole or other super large scale universe object. Even a computer based app where you told it how many degrees your monitor is facing then draw an arrow on the screen. I wish I could write code I would imagine a software engineer could write the code in a few hours.

Reading those forbes articles it said
--- Quote ---Our Sun's peculiar motion of 368 km/s, and our local group's, of 627 km/s, matches up perfectly with how we understand that all galaxies move through space.
--- End quote ---
So is our speed 995 km/s? Or are those at angles, or even 180' away from each other; = motion is between 259 and 995km/h?
This what keeps me from making my time machine and making sure I dont return in space or in the center  of the earth, a very practical use case for this number.

--- End quote ---

The G in GPS stands for Global - it only works within our globe.  So it is of no use once when you are talking positions relative to anything not on earth.

You can bet that we are not orbiting anything in a perfect circular orbit.  Typically, orbits are elliptical.  Perfect circle is an ellipse with eccentricity = zero.  Eccentricity can take on any number depending on the mechanical condition when the object becomes "captured" into a stable orbit.

The Sun orbits about 2/3 the way out from the center of the galaxy, we don't know how circular is our sun's orbit.  We do know that the galaxy's diameter is about 170K to 200K light years (note the 30K light years "certainly" range).  We do not know the sun's position relative to the galaxy's center of mass in resolution to within an earth-diameter.  So, if you want to merely plot your distance to the center of our galaxy, the error will be way bigger than any distance between any two points on earth.

Another "error" would be the changing mass distribution.  Every day, a new sun may be form or an old sun may blow up somewhere.  Even if that didn't happen on a particular day, the mass ejected by exploded suns eons ago are still moving, so those mass are redistributing itself as well.  So, the center of mass of the galaxy is changing within the galaxy itself.  Worst yet, some astrophysicist think we are still in the process of absorbing two other possibly dwarf galaxies that collided with us some time ago...  So, we won't know for sure where the center of the galaxy is until everything inside our galaxy stopped moving around.

Our galaxy's moving against the CMB...  Well, there is general agreement that super-clusters (including our own) are moving in a certain direction, I don't know any astrophysicist who would claim to know exactly how fast and why.

But, many astrophysicist do believe that may be some day, we will know to a very very high degree of precision.  Our cosmic horizon keep on getting smaller (less and less we could see due to the expansion of space itself).  When we can see nothing else, we know we have a relative velocity of zero.  Since there is nothing else, we can't be moving relative to nothing.  Chances are, by then, earth doesn't exist as a planet anymore there is no "we" left anyway.

By the way, be happy that we exist at this particular time.  Had our planet be born say another few tens (or hundreds) of billions of years later, the CMB will become too weak to detect.  We won't know it existed.  We would see fewer surrounding galaxies than we see today (due to expansion).  So we wont think of the "big bang" nor can we verify it did occurred lacking CMB.  We just see our own galaxy and may be a few that was left in our local cluster.  The universe would be a very quiet, dark, and lonely place.

Beamin:

--- Quote from: Rick Law on January 01, 2021, 09:10:21 pm ---
--- Quote from: Beamin on January 01, 2021, 01:06:41 pm ---
What I have been looking for was an app on your phone that took into account time date and GPS and would show you an arrow preferably overlaid with what your phones camera sees (pokemango style) to show you what direction and you speed you are going relative to the CMB dipole or other super large scale universe object. Even a computer based app where you told it how many degrees your monitor is facing then draw an arrow on the screen. I wish I could write code I would imagine a software engineer could write the code in a few hours.

Reading those forbes articles it said
--- Quote ---Our Sun's peculiar motion of 368 km/s, and our local group's, of 627 km/s, matches up perfectly with how we understand that all galaxies move through space.
--- End quote ---
So is our speed 995 km/s? Or are those at angles, or even 180' away from each other; = motion is between 259 and 995km/h?
This what keeps me from making my time machine and making sure I dont return in space or in the center  of the earth, a very practical use case for this number.

--- End quote ---

The G in GPS stands for Global - it only works within our globe.  So it is of no use once when you are talking positions relative to anything not on earth.



--- End quote ---

You are thinking too literally, the GPS would just be used to find which side of the earth you are on 1/2 the day my back is traveling towards some great speed while at night I would be facing toward the speed.

There must be an app, but my phones screens too small for me to browse through, plus I have no idea what to put into a search term. The internet just has really vauge speeds no directions so you cant figure it out like which way the sun is moving, I do know we are 90' toward the glalctic center so I think the north pole is moving" forward"

Rick Law:

--- Quote from: Beamin on January 02, 2021, 04:43:17 pm ---
--- Quote from: Rick Law on January 01, 2021, 09:10:21 pm ---...

--- End quote ---

You are thinking too literally, the GPS would just be used to find which side of the earth you are on 1/2 the day my back is traveling towards some great speed while at night I would be facing toward the speed.

There must be an app, but my phones screens too small for me to browse through, plus I have no idea what to put into a search term. The internet just has really vauge speeds no directions so you cant figure it out like which way the sun is moving, I do know we are 90' toward the glalctic center so I think the north pole is moving" forward"

--- End quote ---

re: "I do know we are 90' toward the glalctic center so I think the north pole is moving" forward"

Any astrophysicist will disagree with you.  Best estimate by astrophysicist is that our solar plane is a 63 degree inclined verses the galactic plane.  The earth's orbital plane is also at an inclined against the solar plane.  Even ignoring rotational precession, the north pole is no where near stably pointing 90 degrees from galactic plane.  It may move past it, sure, but not stably pointing in any direction vs galactic plane.

Measuring your present velocity vs solar center, we have a shot.  Measuring our velocity vs the CM (center of mass) of the galaxy, we are guessing - and not very good guesses at that.  The solar system diameter (edge of the heliosphere) is just 0.0028 light years.  Our earth's orbit around the sun is merely 0.0000158 light years (1AU).  Earth diameter is around 6.72e-10 light years.  And, we don't know the diameter of the galaxy to within 30 light years, just at between 170 to 200 light years.

To translate it to EE terms, you are trying to measure small changes in a 0.0028 Volt source using a DMM with accuracy of +-15 volts.  And that is measuring the solar system's movement against the galaxy which is much bigger than earth-diameter.

Best estimate is our "orbit" takes around 200 million years.  Orbit doesn't necessarily means stable.  Factoring in what we already know, that is within the time scale of the orbit stability breaking down.  Andromeda is coming at us and arrival in about 1 to 1.5 billion years.  So may be we can "orbit" another few rounds before Andromeda totally pull us of the track - directly, or by pulling so many other stars that our galactic CM is at "god knows where".

You are assuming the galaxy being far more stable, and our knowledge being far superior than it actually is.


Reference link:
Cornell University site, article "Are the planes of solar systems aligned with the plane of the Galaxy? (Intermediate)"   June 28, 2015
"... Our own solar system is tipped by about 63 degrees with respect to the plane of the galaxy. You can see that on this infrared picture taken by the IRAS satellite. ..."
http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/about-us/159-our-solar-system/the-sun/the-solar-system/236-are-the-planes-of-solar-systems-aligned-with-the-plane-of-the-galaxy-intermediate

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