Solar system motion in space

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🌍 Is our Solar System stationary in the Cosmos? With our feet firmly planted on the Earth, we might at first glance think that the universe around us is somewhat static. However, if we take the time to observe our celestial environment, there's no doubt that everything is in motion. Despite its peaceful appearance, our planet continues its frantic race through space, revolving around the shimmering Sun. But what about our entire planetary system? Does it have a single cosmic address? Or is it part of the countless cogs that make up and organize our Universe?

To answer these questions, we're going to explore our Solar System in all its nooks and crannies. We'll discover that it's much more than just a grouping of planets orbiting a star, and that it occupies a unique place at the heart of the Milky Way, which nevertheless counts over 200 billion stars.




🔥 As a reminder, videos are published on SUNDAYS at 6pm.


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💥 Our place in the Milky Way:
What do we know about our position in the Milky Way?
A priori, our Sun is less than 30,000 light-years from Sagittarius A*, the supermassive black hole that more or less marks the middle of our galactic disk. This distance is not easy to define, because to be able to establish exact measurements, we'd need to gain height - in other words, to extricate ourselves from our own Galaxy. But this is impossible. For a long time, the distance between the Sun and the black hole was estimated at 27,700 light-years. Then, the Gravity consortium reduced this distance to 26,673 light-years. However, our Sun turns out to be even closer to Sagittarius A*.
Vera, the Observatory's large telescope in Chile, with its incredible resolution of 10 microseconds of arc, theoretically able to glimpse a small coin on the lunar surface, has confirmed that our Solar System is actually only 25,800 light-years away from the center of the Milky Way.

Our Sun takes 225 to 250 million years to complete one cosmic year, i.e. its full orbit around the Milky Way. It moves at a prodigious speed of around 828,000 km/h. In other words, our Solar System, following its orbit, moves some 20,000 km in just 90 seconds. Since its birth, and despite this prodigious speed, it has circled our galaxy 20 times, making it the largest galaxy in the Local Group, after the Andromeda Galaxy.

Our Solar System is nestled in one of the Galaxy's spiral arms, the Orion Arm, also known as the Local Arm, where it lies midway between the edge and center of the Milky Way. This arm extends outwards from the Sagittarius arm, one of the four major arms of our Galaxy. However, this mapping of the Galaxy could well be called into question. Studies conducted using the National Science Foundation's Very Long Baseline Array telescopes suggest that Orion's arm may well be larger than previously thought. It should no longer be seen as a small, spiky region of the Galaxy, but rather as a major structure, probably a branch of the Perseus Arm, or even an independent arm segment.

Compared with the size of the Milky Way, which is estimated to be several tens of thousands of light-years across, our Solar System may seem extremely small, with a diameter of around 20 billion km, or about 130 astronomical units. However, this is not the case. Nasa's Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched in 1977, took more than 30 years to reach the edge of the heliosphere, despite speeds of up to 61,500 km/h. The heliosphere marks the limit beyond which the Earth's solar system can travel. This marks the limit beyond which the Sun's magnetic fields dissipate.


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