What is the time taken by the sun to revolve around the center of our galaxy?

The Milk Way is the galaxy our solar system calls home. For thousands of years, the Milky Way's beauty and wonder have inspired legendary stories and curious astronomers gazing at the night sky. We've only recently learned some of the fascinating details of the Milk Way. While there is still more left to be uncovered, here are 10 facts we know about the Milk Way. 1. How Big Is the Milky Way? According to NASA , the Milky Way galaxy is about 100,000 light-years across. Wide may be an understatement. However, our neighboring galaxy, Andromeda, is roughly 220,000 light-years across. And some can be millions of light-years wide. Read More: How Big Is the Milky Way? 2. How Does Our Solar System Move Around the Milky Way? Much like our planet moves around the sun, our solar system also orbits around the center of the Milky Way. Instead of taking one year, however, our solar system takes about 230 million years to complete one turn around the galactic center. That means the last time the solar system was where we are now, the Jurassic Period was in its infancy. 3. What Is at the Center of the Milky Way? (Credit:NASA) Our solar system and all other matter within the Milky Way revolve around a supermassive black hole, commonly called Sagittarius A* (pronounced "Sagittarius A star"). This supermassive black hole is dormant and only occasionally absorbs dust and gases. According to NASA , Sgr A* has a mass about 4 million times that of our sun. Because of its proximity to Earth (26,0...

As you can see from the diagrams below of the motion of the Solar System's barycenter relative to the Sun (courtesy of Wikipedia), the Sun's motion with respect to the system's barycenter is not a simple closed curve, and it doesn't have a simple period. (Click the above image for a SVG version). It is primarily dominated by Jupiter's period (11.862 years) because Jupiter has most of the non-solar mass of the Solar System. (On a related note, Jupiter has most of the angular momentum of the solar system). Jupiter's mass is approximately 0.0009543 solar masses, so the Sun is almost 1048 times more massive than Jupiter. According to To calculate the actual motion of the Sun, you only need to consider the motions of the four giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune). The contributions of all other planets, dwarf planets, etc. are negligible. Here is a FWIW, here's a plot of the Sun's speed relative to the barycentre.

Our galaxy does indeed! The Milky Way is one of two large galaxies that make up what’s called the Local Group, which contains some fifty-odd galaxies. The other large galaxy involved is Andromeda, our closest galactic neighbor; our galaxy and Andromeda are slowly orbiting each other. The rest of the Local Group are mostly small things, like the Large or Small Magellanic Clouds, which are gravitationally tied to either the Milky Way or Andromeda, and orbit the larger galaxy to which they’re bound. Andromeda weighs in somewhere between 700 billion solar masses and a trillion solar masses. This is approximately the same mass as our own Milky Way, which is also usually considered to have about a trillion solar masses worth of stuff hanging around. If you want to figure out how any two objects are going to orbit each other, you want to know their mass, how far apart they are, and how fast they’re moving relative to each other. With this information, you can determine what path the two objects will take relative to each other. The main thing we need to be concerned with right now is the mass. The masses of your two objects - in this case, the Milky Way and Andromeda - determine the point around which both objects will orbit. This is called the centre of mass, and is defined as the point in space that has an equal distribution of mass around it. For a system like the Sun and the Earth, the Sun contains almost all the mass - the mass of the Earth being so far away doesn’t really c...

If the center of the Milky Way were a city, we would be living in suburbia, about 25,000 to 30,000 light-years from the city center. Life in the outskirts is good; we find ourselves nestled in one of the smaller neighborhoods, the Orion-Cygnus Arm, sandwiched between larger Perseus and Carina-Sagittarius arms. If we were to travel inwards towards the city center, we would find the Scutum-Centaurus and Norma arms. Related: On a clear night, void of light pollution, we can catch a glimpse of the bright lights of the galactic city streaking across the night sky. Our window into the universe, this milky white band of stars, dust and gas is where our galaxy gets its name. Lying at the very heart of the Milky Way is a imaged this glutton at the core of our galaxy for the very first time, through an innovative technique allowing us to view the shadow of the black hole. Why is our galaxy called the Milky Way? According to the Around the world, the Milky Way is known by different names. For example in China it is called "Silver River" and in the Kalahari Desert in South Africa it's called the "Backbone of Night". Milky Way FAQS answered by an expert We asked Rory Bentley, astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles, a few frequently asked questions about the Milky Way. Astronomer and graduate student at the University of California, Los Angeles, specializing in high-mass stars and studies of the Milky Way's core. Where is Earth in the Milky Way? Earth is located roughly...

Question: I have read that the Sun is about 15.3 kpc from the centre of the Galaxy and moving at about 230 km/s. I have also read that it takes about 200 million years to orbit the Galaxy. But if the orbit is approx. circular, the period is 2 x pi x radius / velocity which comes out at about 400 million years. What am I missing? — Bruce Answer: As you pointed out, the Sun takes about 226 million years to orbit the center of our Galaxy, and it orbits at a speed of about 230 km/s. The distance from the Sun to the center of our Galaxy, though, is about 8 kilo-parsecs (kpc), which accounts for the factor-of-two overestimate in your orbital period calculation. As our Galaxy is about 30 kpc in diameter, your calculation would be appropriate for a star on the edge of the Galactic disk. Jeff Mangum

By using sunspots, he had discovered that the sun rotates, pleasingly ironic given these dark cool patches on the surface of the sun are an artifact of that rotation. To this day, astronomers and solar scientists use sunspots and other features on the surface of our star to measure its rotation.Yet, there is more to learn about the sun's rotation. Primarily, how different it is from the rotation of our planet. Is the sun's rotation different? While Earth and the other inner planets are composed of solid rock, the sun is an ultra-hot ball of dense ionized gas — mainly That means that the way it rotates is different than the way our planet, The sun experiences something called differential rotation. This means that its rotation proceeds at different rates depending on where you look at the star. "Since the sun is a ball of gas/plasma, it does not have to rotate rigidly like the solid planets and moons do," — Does the moon rotate? — Perihelion: The sun up close — How big is the sun? Moving from the sun's poles to its equator, the time in which this area of plasma rotates shortens. The poles complete a rotation in 35 days, while the area just above the equator completes a rotation in just 25 days. This means that no area of the sun completes an orbit anywhere near as rapidly as our planet does. The sun (right) is orbited by the planets of the solar system. (Image credit: ANDRZEJ WOJCICKI/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY via Getty Images.) Differences in rotation rates on our star aren't ...

[/caption] Look across the Universe, and you’ll see that almost everything is rotating. The Earth rotates on its axis as it orbits the Sun. And the Sun itself is rotating. As you can probably guess, we even have galaxy rotation with our Milky Way galaxy. Our galaxy is rotating incredibly slowly, however. It takes the Sun 220 million years to complete a single orbit around the galaxy. In the 4.6 billion years that the Sun and planets have been here, they’ve only rotated around the center of the galaxy about 20 times. We know that galaxy rotation is happening because the Milky Way is a flattened disk, in the same way that the Solar System is a flattened disk. The centrifugal force from the rotation flattens out the galactic disk. All stars in the galactic disk follow roughly circular orbits around the center of the galaxy. Stars in the halo can have much different orbits and speeds. Remove All Ads on Universe Today Join our Patreon for as little as $3! Get the ad-free experience for life The calculation of the high rotational speed of the galaxy led to the discovery of dark matter. If our galaxy contained just the matter we can see – planets, gas, etc – the galaxy rotation should cause it to spin apart. Instead, there’s much more mass holding the galaxy together. In fact, astronomers have calculated that the total mass of the galaxy is probably 10 times greater than the sum of all the stars in it. 90% of this is invisible dark matter, holding the galaxy rotation together. An...