Our solar system has been orbiting the core of the Milky Way’s black hole for 4.6 billion years, but it remains difficult to determine how many trips our Sun has made around the galaxy during that time.
Some may be surprised by the idea that the Earth moves through space, making two simultaneous trips around the Sun and through the Milky Way. Just as the Moon revolves around the Earth and our planet revolves around the Sun, our star also revolves around the Milky Way Galaxy – or, more precisely, orbits around the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. In fact, the entire Milky Way is constantly orbiting the core of the black hole in our galaxy.
How many times has our solar system orbited the black hole in the Milky Way?
The answer is not as easy as it may seem at first glance. Compared to the orbits of the planets around the Sun, the path of our star through the Milky Way Galaxy is inconceivably longer and less stable, making it difficult to count the number of times we have orbited the center of the galaxy.
Using simple mathematics can reveal how long it currently takes the solar system to cross our galaxy, which in turn can provide a good estimate of how many times our cosmic neighbors have made the trip.
But providing a more precise answer is difficult, because scientists are not sure if the Sun’s orbital path has remained constant all this time.
The Sun and the rest of the solar system are currently traveling through our galaxy at a speed of about 448,000 miles per hour (720,000 km/h). This sounds incredibly fast, but some stars in the Milky Way, known as hypervelocity stars, traverse the galaxy at speeds of up to 5.1 million miles per hour. The clock is 8.2 million km/h.
Given the current speed of the Sun, it would take our star about 230 million years to complete one trip around the Milky Way, which is longer than the time dinosaurs walked on Earth and more than 750 times longer than humans lived on Earth.
According to Planetary Society data, 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, it would have completed about 20 trips across our galaxy, and the Earth would have drifted in about 98%. From those trips.
However, scientists estimate that the Sun’s orbit has not remained constant throughout its life, and it is possible that our star has moved slightly since it was first formed.
Radial migration
Victor DiBattista, an astrophysicist at the University of Central Lancashire in the United Kingdom, says that there is a strong possibility that the Sun was not born where we find it now, and that our star may have been born near the center of the Milky Way.
DiBattista explained that we currently exist about 26,100 light-years from the center of the galaxy, but the mineralogy or chemistry of our Sun indicates that it was born about 16,300 light-years from the heart of the galaxy.
This movement is known as “radial migration,” DiBattista noted, which involves pushing stars along the spiral arms of galaxies like the Milky Way, a movement similar to the way athletes surf waves.
Victor DiBattista reported that when the sun was born, its orbital cycle was much shorter, and it is likely that our star took about 125 million years to complete a round trip, pointing out that as the sun migrated outward, its rotation period increased, but it likely took billions of years to move. to its current location.
