The True Scale of the Orion Arm... And How Tiny We Actually Are
20,000 light-years. This is our cosmic address, the tiny neighborhood where our Sun and planets reside . It is a relatively small and quiet spur between two massive arms, but it is still so vast that all of human history has unfolded in a blink of its cosmic eye . Our entire solar system moves at 220 km/s through this galactic stream, a journey that takes 250 million years to complete a single orbit of the galaxy . Let this scale wash over you, a gentle invitation to surrender to the quiet enormity of your place in the cosmos.
The skinny
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