Written By: Ivey Ingalls-Rubin

The planets in our solar system orbit around the sun. Each orbit for earth is one year. This you all know. Whilst this is all going on, our entire solar system orbits the center of the Milky Way galaxy. Our sun and the solar system move around 800 thousand kilometers per hour, which is about 500 thousand miles an hour. That is one fast moving, massive orbit! For example, in 90 seconds we all move some 20,000 kilometers or 12,500 miles in orbit around our galaxies center.

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is one big place. Though we’re going at such high speeds, it still takes the sun approximately 225 million years to complete one journey around the galaxy’s center. This amount of time it takes us to orbit the center of the galaxy is called a “cosmic year.”

So the bottom line is this: The planets in our solar system all revolve around the sun, whilst the sun revolves around the center of the Milky Way galaxy. We take about 225 million years to revolve around the galaxy’s center. To put this into perspective, the last time Earth was in its current position, dinosaurs were just beginning to roam the Earth.

To read more about a comic year and Earths location in the Milky Way please visit:

http://www.astrosociety.org/edu/publications/tnl/71/howfast.html