Galactic position

See also: Location of Earth, Galactic year, and Orbit of the Sun

Diagram of the Milky Way, with galactic features and the relative
position of the Solar System labelled.

The Solar System is located in the Milky Way, a barred spiral galaxy with a diameter of about
100,000 light-years containing more than 100 billion stars.[268] The Sun is part of one of the Milky Way's
outer spiral arms, known as the Orion–Cygnus Arm or Local Spur.[269][270] It is a member of the thin
disk population of stars orbiting close to the galactic plane.[271]

Its speed around the center of the Milky Way is about 220 km/s, so that it completes one revolution
every 240 million years.[268] This revolution is known as the Solar System's galactic year.[272] The solar
apex, the direction of the Sun's path through interstellar space, is near the constellation Hercules in the
direction of the current location of the bright star Vega.[273] The plane of the ecliptic lies at an angle of
about 60° to the galactic plane.[c]

The Sun follows a nearly circular orbit around the Galactic Center (where the supermassive black
hole Sagittarius A* resides) at a distance of 26,660 light-years,[275] orbiting at roughly the same speed as
that of the spiral arms.[276] If it orbited close to the center, gravitational tugs from nearby stars could
perturb bodies in the Oort cloud and send many comets into the inner Solar System, producing collisions
with potentially catastrophic implications for life on Earth. In this scenario, the intense radiation of the
Galactic Center could interfere with the development of complex life.[276]

The Solar System's location in the Milky Way is a factor in the evolutionary history of life on Earth. Spiral
arms are home to a far larger concentration of supernovae, gravitational instabilities, and radiation that
could disrupt the Solar System, but since Earth stays in the Local Spur and therefore does not pass
frequently through spiral arms, this has given Earth long periods of stability for life to evolve.
[276]
However, according to the controversial Shiva hypothesis, the changing position of the Solar System
relative to other parts of the Milky Way could explain periodic extinction events on Earth.[277][278]

Discovery and exploration

Main article: Discovery and exploration of the Solar System

 The motion of 'lights' moving across the sky is the basis of the
classical definition of planets: wandering stars.

Humanity's knowledge of the Solar System has grown incrementally over the centuries. Up to the Late
Middle Ages–Renaissance, astronomers from Europe to India believed Earth to be stationary at the
center of the universe[279] and categorically different from the divine or ethereal objects that moved
through the sky. Although the Greek philosopher Aristarchus of Samos had speculated on
a heliocentric reordering of the cosmos, Nicolaus Copernicus was the first person known to have
developed a mathematically predictive heliocentric system.[280][281]

Heliocentrism did not triumph immediately over geocentrism, but the work of Copernicus had its
champions, notably Johannes Kepler. Using a heliocentric model that improved upon Copernicus by
allowing orbits to be elliptical, and the precise observational data of Tycho Brahe, Kepler produced
the Rudolphine Tables, which enabled accurate computations of the positions of the then-known
planets. Pierre Gassendi used them to predict a transit of Mercury in 1631, and Jeremiah Horrocks did
the same for a transit of Venus in 1639. This provided a strong vindication of heliocentrism and Kepler's
elliptical orbits.[282][283]

In the 17th century, Galileo publicized the use of the telescope in astronomy; he and Simon
Marius independently discovered that Jupiter had four satellites in orbit around it.[284] Christiaan
Huygens followed on from these observations by discovering Saturn's moon Titan and the shape of
the rings of Saturn.[285] In 1677, Edmond Halley observed a transit of Mercury across the Sun, leading him
to realize that observations of the solar parallax of a planet (more ideally using the transit of Venus)
could be used to trigonometrically determine the distances between Earth, Venus, and the Sun.
[286]
Halley's friend Isaac Newton, in his magisterial Principia Mathematica of 1687, demonstrated that
celestial bodies are not quintessentially different from Earthly ones: the same laws of motion and
of gravity apply on Earth and in the skies.[51]: 142
 True-scale Solar System diagram made by Emanuel Bowen in 1747.
At that time, Uranus, Neptune, nor the asteroid belts have been discovered yet.

The term "Solar System" entered the English language by 1704, when John Locke used it to refer to the
Sun, planets, and comets.[287] In 1705, Halley realized that repeated sightings of a comet were of the
same object, returning regularly once every 75–76 years. This was the first evidence that anything other
than the planets repeatedly orbited the Sun,[288] though Seneca had theorized this about comets in the
1st century.[289] Careful observations of the 1769 transit of Venus allowed astronomers to calculate the
average Earth–Sun distance as 93,726,900 miles (150,838,800 km), only 0.8% greater than the modern
value.[290]

Uranus, having occasionally been observed since 1690 and possibly from antiquity, was recognized to be
a planet orbiting beyond Saturn by 1783.[291] In 1838, Friedrich Bessel successfully measured a stellar
parallax, an apparent shift in the position of a star created by Earth's motion around the Sun, providing
the first direct, experimental proof of heliocentrism.[292] Neptune was identified as a planet some years
later, in 1846, thanks to its gravitational pull causing a slight but detectable variation in the orbit of
Uranus.[293] Mercury's orbital anomaly observations led to searches for Vulcan, a planet interior of
Mercury, but these attempts were quashed with Albert Einstein's theory of general relativity in 1915.[294]

In the 20th century, humans began their space exploration around the Solar System, starting with
placing telescopes in space since the 1960s.[295] By 1989, all eight planets have been visited by space
probes.[296] Probes have returned samples from comets[297] and asteroids,[298] as well as flown through
the Sun's corona[299] and visited two dwarf planets (Pluto and Ceres).[300][301] To save on fuel, some space
missions make use of gravity assist maneuvers, such as the two Voyager probes accelerating when flyby
planets in the outer Solar System[302] and the Parker Solar Probe decelerating closer towards the Sun after
flyby with Venus.[303]

Humans have landed on the Moon during the Apollo program in the 1960s and 1970s[304] and will return
to the Moon in the 2020s with the Artemis program.[305] Discoveries in the 20th and 21st century has
prompted the redefinition of the term planet in 2006, hence the demotion of Pluto to a dwarf planet,
[306]
and further interest in trans-Neptunian objects.[307]