Name: What If Earth Was Near the Center of the Milky Way?
Uploaded: 2020-04-04T07:56:12.000Z
Duration: 4 min 39 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

It has four large, spiral arms encircling its center.

just like most galaxies in the observable universe.

for the survival of any kind of life on the planet.

But not because of the Milky Way's supermassive black hole...

The Earth is located in a quiet neighborhood

in one of the smallest spurs of the Milky Way - the Orion Arm.

We've got approximately 27,000 light-years

The temperatures on Earth are just right to sustain life.

And there aren't too many space hazards that could wipe out our existence.

I didn't say it's completely safe, did I?

Living anywhere near the center of the Milky Way would be... different.

It would depend on what part of that center

The closer you get to the heart of the galaxy,

the tighter the stars are packed together.

Because of this high star density, the Earth would be blasted

with a lot more radiation than what the Sun throws at you right now.

Under these circumstances, the odds of life

But if the Earth moved to the center together with all its inhabitants,

Earth's magnetosphere wouldn't be able to protect you

from space radiation blasting from all directions.

and cause everything on the planet to either mutate or die.

If you lived, your biggest concern would be

A supernova occurs when a massive star collapses

releasing radio waves, X-rays, cosmic rays and gamma rays into space.

For all we know, one massive stellar body

could throw the Earth out of the Sun's orbit.

Our planet would be surrounded by foreign stars

until one of them exploded in a supernova and wiped us out for good.

But it would look spectacular from Earth,

There's another big hazard that lies within the Milky Way's center -

a supermassive black hole called Sagittarius A*.

If getting sucked into a black hole isn't on your to-do list,

that we wouldn't get engulfed by this cosmic beast.

But we could get close enough to get caught in the black hole's orbit.

At a distance of 20 billion km (12 billion mi)

the Earth could develop a speed of 25 million km/h (15.5 million mph).

than the speed our planet is moving at right now.

The Earth is perfectly designed to be right where it is.

It can survive on the outskirts of the galaxy,

but you wouldn't want it to be anywhere else.

The most dangerous place for a planet to be located

is anywhere near the center of a galaxy - any galaxy.

your best bet might be to teleport the Earth to the middle of a nebula instead.

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What If Earth Was Near the Center of the Milky Way?

massive

spectacular

completely

evolve