When to use Galactic Year: Sun's Orbit 3D Explorer
Use this explorer when you want to connect a historical or deep-time date to how far around the galaxy the Solar System has traveled since then.
- Teaching how orbital speed, radius, and period relate to each other using the Sun's own galactic orbit
- Explaining why "the Sun has completed about 20 laps of the galaxy" is a real, citable way to talk about deep time
- Showing why the Sun's path is not a flat circle - published studies find it also bobs up and down through the galactic disk plane
This is an educational approximation, not a dynamical simulation.
Walk the controls in the step-by-step guide, or compare options in vs alternatives. Open the Galactic Year: Sun's Orbit 3D Explorer.
Companion guide for the Galactic Year: Sun's Orbit 3D Explorer. This page sits alongside the step-by-step walkthrough and the comparison against alternatives, so you can move between timing guidance, control instructions, and the numbers table without leaving the guide set.
The explorer itself runs entirely client-side in the browser with the vendored three.js engine - no account, no install, and no scene data leaves your device. For the wider picture, the Space 3D collection also has a Milky Way Map explorer and a Sagittarius A* Star Orbit explorer.
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