The Sun’s Orbit around the Milky Way: How Many Times Does the Sun Revolve around the Galaxy?

KOMPAS.com – The Sun, and the entire solar system, orbits around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy at an average speed of 828,000 km/h.

Even with that speed, the sun still takes around 230 million years to complete one orbit around the Milky Way.

The entire Milky Way actually continues to revolve around the heart of this galaxy’s black hole.

How many times does the sun revolve around the Milky Way?

The answer to this question is not simple. Compared to the orbits of the planets around the sun, the sun’s path through the Milky Way is much longer and less stable, making it difficult to calculate how many times the sun has orbited the center of the galaxy.

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Using simple mathematics, experts can uncover how long it takes for the solar system to traverse the Milky Way, which in turn can provide an estimate of how many times human-inhabited cosmic environments have made the journey.

The sun and the entire solar system move through the Milky Way very quickly. However, some stars in the Milky Way, known as hypervelocity stars, travel across the galaxy at speeds of up to 8.2 million km/h.

At the sun’s current speed, it would take the sun about 230 million years to complete one journey around the Milky Way.

That’s longer than dinosaurs have lived on Earth and more than 750 times longer than humans (Homo sapiens) have existed.

The Sun is about 4.6 billion years old and the Earth was born about 100 million years later. This means that if the sun’s orbital path had remained constant all this time, the sun would have completed about 20 trips across the Milky Way, and the Earth would have been along for 98% of those trips.

Also read: A Giant Hole 60 Times the Size of the Earth Appears in the Sun

However, the sun’s orbit does not remain constant throughout its lifetime. Instead, the sun has likely moved around since it first formed.

According to Victor Debattista, an astrophysicist at the University of Central Lancashire, England, the sun may not have been born where it is found now. Instead, this star was probably born closer to the center of the Milky Way.

Currently, the sun is approximately 26,100 light years from the center of the galaxy. However, the metallicity, or chemical content, of the sun suggests that it was born about 16,300 light years from the galaxy’s core.

As the sun migrated outward, its orbital period increased, but it likely took billions of years to move to its current position.

This means the sun has actually been thrown through the Milky Way much more than previously thought, although the exact amount remains unclear.

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2023-12-20 11:30:00
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