A Galactic Year is the time it takes our solar system to orbit the Milky Way. It takes ~230 million years to finish one and we actually undulate up and down along the way: gravity pulls us toward the dense disk, but our momentum makes us overshoot, so we get pulled down again

Vertical extent of this oscillatory motion is greatly exaggerated, and do take the locations and timing with a pinch of salt: the uncertainties are 10s of millions of years. (it& #39;s difficult to understand the motion of a galaxy when you& #39;re inside it)

By the way the relative positions of the planets in part 1/2 are the real-world positions from 2020-2050. In other words, if you paused it at any time, you& #39;d get the proper solar system configuration for that date

I just wanted to show you rougly where we& #39;re headed with my video, so I& #39;m now going to recommend some further watching... this is one of my favourite videos about the spiral structure of galaxies: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_bWFHGaPWg">https://www.youtube.com/watch...

In part 1/2 the solar system is shown moving perpendicular to the ecliptic plane here, but it& #39;s actually a little off: the path we make is shallower than that (at this part in the galactic year). Anyway, I& #39;ve thought of a better way to show this, will do it later in year