63 orbits completed!

Today I celebrate 63 successful orbits of this yellow-dwarf star we call Sol1. Yet all is not as it seems. At the completion of one orbit, I never really come back to the same place. The sun has moved along on its own orbit around the galactic centre (at a brisk 230 kilometres per second). In reality, after completing one orbit of the sun, I will now be about 7.26 billion kilometres away from my starting point. You want to know how long it will take for me to return to that same point? Well, crunching the numbers I calculate (ie I look it up on wikipedia) roughly 250 million years2. Cosmologists have calculated that our Sol was ‘born’ on May 9th. What a coincidence! Not many people know that3. Over its own lifetime, Sol has completed (approx) 20 orbits of the galactic centre (one galactic year). So happy 20th for the sun too! Therefore, I celebrate that I am 63 Sol years and 0.00000028 Galactic years old today. To mark this occasion with its due significance, I shall be going out to a…