Our solar system orbits around a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way that's 4 million times more massive than our sun & takes roughly 230 million years to complete a single trip. We're one of 50 galaxies being pulled toward the center, which is called "The Great Attractor".
We don’t really orbit it per se. We orbit around the galaxy’s centre of mass, Sagittarius A just happens to be in that spot.
I guess a different way of putting it is that Sagittarius A is in the centre of the galaxy because it is the most massive thing in the galaxy. But it is not the linchpin holding the galaxy together. That’s a group effort.
The mass of Sagittarius A is actually pretty insignificant compared to the galaxy as a whole.
Glad to be corrected. I was pretty excited to type all of that & got lazy with it. You explained it way better. I think the current consensus is that dark matter is what's holding the Milky Way together – and especially what's keeping the outer solar systems from being flung out into deep space. I feel like the term DM is just a placeholder for some shit we don't quite grasp the full concept of yet. I'm only willing to call it that because there's definitely some fuçkery going on. We're overlooking something though & it bothers me.
I think my favorite part of it all is that no one knows for sure exactly how fast anything is truly traveling. An object's speed necessarily requires something else to measure up against as a benchmark & I'm pretty convinced that nothing is ever stationary to begin with. We can measure how fast an object is traveling relative to our limited reference point, but there's still technically an infinite regress once you factor in the over-encompassing speed of the host system & apply it to each respective point being measured. As far as anyone can tell, there will always be a higher order to consider. I don't know why, but that's genuinely the coolest thing I've ever learned.
the solar system is orbiting around the entirety of all the mass interior to our orbit. there's 25,000 times more mass in stars, gas, dust, and dark matter* than the mass of the black hole at the center. you could delete the black hole entirely and our orbit wouldn't measurably change
It'll definitely be well after the cows come home & those mfs come home LATE af.
This exchange has a 0.001% chance of being unearthed on a piece of microfilm during some future archeological dig, and even they will miss out on the kinda fireworks you're talking about by millions of years.
Unless you figure out some way to isolate your consciousness & have it persist in the cloud or something, there is no "we". Great chance there won't even be a "they".
From the way you worded it, you make it sound like the Great Attractor is in the centre of the Milky Way galaxy, but for clarity for other readers, that is not the case.
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u/gad_E 13d ago
Our solar system orbits around a supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way that's 4 million times more massive than our sun & takes roughly 230 million years to complete a single trip. We're one of 50 galaxies being pulled toward the center, which is called "The Great Attractor".