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It takes the Solar System about 240 million years to complete one orbit of the Milky Way (a galactic year), so the Sun is thought to have completed 18–20 orbits during its lifetime and 1/1250 of a revolution since the origin of humans.
Location of the Solar System within the Milky Way. The Solar System travels alone through the Milky Way in a circular orbit approximately 30,000 light years from the Galactic Center. Its speed is about 220 km/s.
The Orion Arm, also known as the Orion–Cygnus Arm, is a minor spiral arm within the Milky Way Galaxy spanning 3,500 light-years (1,100 parsecs) in width and extending roughly 10,000 light-years (3,100 parsecs) in length. This galactic structure encompasses the Solar System, including Earth.
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. The Sun is part of one of the Milky Way's outer spiral arms, known as the Orion–Cygnus Arm or Local Spur.
Seven planets were placed in orbit around it in an order of increasing distance from the Earth, as established by the Greek Stoics: the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. This list included two objects, the Sun and the Moon, which are now not generally considered planets.
The Milky Way and those satellite dwarf galaxies gravitationally bound to it. Examples include the Sagittarius Dwarf , the Ursa Minor Dwarf and the Canis Major Dwarf . Cited distance is the orbital diameter of the Leo T Dwarf galaxy, the most distant galaxy in the Milky Way subgroup.
As the Sun orbits the Milky Way, wandering stars may approach close enough to have a disruptive influence on the Solar System.
There are 61 small galaxies confirmed to be within 420 kiloparsecs (1.4 million light-years) of the Milky Way, but not all of them are necessarily in orbit, and some may themselves be in orbit of other satellite galaxies.
Based on mass and increasingly precise radius limits, astronomers have concluded that Sagittarius A* must be the central supermassive black hole of the Milky Way galaxy. The current value of its mass is 4.297 ± 0.012 million solar masses.
The Andromeda–Milky Way collision is a galactic collision predicted to occur in about 4.5 billion years between the two largest galaxies in the Local Group—the Milky Way (which contains the Solar System and Earth) and the Andromeda Galaxy.