Do all planets, star, asteroids and other object have similar speed? Could we get hit by an object going the same speed as the sun (200km/s)?
In: Planetary Science
The good news is that most of the stuff around us was caught up in the formation of our solar system, so it’s going around the sun in the same direction as us and at similar speeds.
Most of the things that might intersect with the Earth would do so with a relative velocity of about 18 kilometers per second. That’s really, really fast, but not crazy fast. Even extrasolar objects tend to be things that were swept up in the same forces as us in the formation of the milky way, with a similar velocity.
But that isn’t everything. A rogue object ejected from another solar system could have tremendous relative velocity. Earth is rarely hit by charged particles with a velocity that is a signifgant percentage of the speed of light. Things like a rogue proton with the energy of a baseball thrown by a professional pitcher. These likely come from energetic stellar events like nova.
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