It is difficult to understand that the Earth is moving in space. But it’s even more surprising to realize that you’re making two simultaneous journeys around the sun and through the Milky Way. Just as the Moon orbits the Earth and our planet revolves around the Sun, our home star orbits the Milky Way, or more precisely, the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. In fact, the entire Milky Way constantly revolves around the black hole that is the heart of our galaxy.

So how many times has our solar system orbited the giant black hole at the heart of the Milky Way? Developing an answer is not as easy as it might seem at first glance. Compared to the orbits of the planets around the Sun, our home star’s path through the Milky Way is incredibly long and much less stable, making it difficult to count how many times we orbit the center of the galaxy.

Using simple mathematics, it is possible to determine how long it currently takes the solar system to pass our galaxy; This could provide a good estimate of how many times our space neighbors have made this journey. But it is difficult to give a more precise answer.

The Sun and the rest of the Solar System are currently hurtling through our galaxy at approximately 448,000 mph (720,000 km/h). This seems incredibly fast, but some stars in the Milky Way, known as hypervelocity stars, are crossing the galaxy at speeds of up to 8.2 million km/h.

At the Sun’s current speed, it would take our host star about 230 million years to orbit the Milky Way. This is longer than dinosaurs walked on Earth and 750 times longer than humans (Homo sapiens) have existed.

According to the Planetary Society, the Sun is about 4.6 billion years old and the Earth was born about 100 million years later. This means that if the Sun’s orbital path remained the same the entire time, it would make about 20 orbits around our galaxy, with the Earth drifting for about 98% of those orbits.

However, the Sun’s orbit did not remain constant throughout life. Instead, our home star has probably moved around quite a bit since its inception.

“The sun probably didn’t rise where we find it now,” Victor Debattista, an astrophysicist specializing in galaxy evolution at the University of Central Lancashire in the United Kingdom, told LiveScience. Instead, he added, our native star was probably born much closer to the center of the Milky Way.

We are currently approximately 26,100 light-years from the center of the galaxy. However, our sun’s metallicity, or chemical composition, indicates that it was born approximately 16,300 light-years from the galactic core. This outward movement is known as “radial migration,” which involves stars being pushed along the spiral arms of galaxies like the Milky Way by the momentum of their rotating limbs — sort of “like a surfer riding a wave,” Debattista says.

When the sun rose, its orbital period was much shorter. Our star’s round-trip journey probably takes about 125 million years, Debattista said. He added that as the Sun moves outward, its orbital period increases, but it probably took billions of years to reach its current position.

This means that the Sun passed through the Milky Way more times than our previous estimate suggested, but exactly how many times is unknown.

Radial migration also occurs in many other stars. “About half of the stars near the Sun are believed to have been born elsewhere [і була витіснена назовні]”said Debattista. He added that as we move away from the center of the Milky Way, the percentage of stars migrating outwards also increases.

The Sun is now believed to be in a fairly stable orbit around our galaxy. However, there is a possibility that he could not complete the movement completely. Debattista said it’s “definitely possible” that the sun will continue to move outward. “But it is impossible to predict to what extent.”