Gift From Zeta Reticuli

Now, to understand the scale, diameter of Milky Way is about 100,000 LY, and the map above has a width of about 1,000 px, that gives the map scale: 1px = 100 LY. The yellow spot’s size is about 20 px in diameter, which translates into 2,000 LY. Of course, our Solar system is thousand times smaller than this, and our Sun is billion times smaller, as the yellow spot covers our neighborhood of about 1,000 LY radius. And Zeta Reticuli, which is 40 LY from us, is definitely inside that yellow spot. There are plenty of interesting stars inside the yellow spot: for example, the oldest known star in the Milky Way, Methuselah’s Star, which is 3 times older than our Sun, and is only 200 LY away from us. Now, besides distances in LY (and in px on the map), we need to understand distances in time. Milky Way stars rotate at a speed in the range of 220–330 km/sec, that is about 1,000 times less than 300,000 km/sec speed of light. For example, our Sun needs 1,000+ years to cover 1 LY distance. 66–65 million years ago, when dinosaurs went extinct, our Sun was at 9 o’clock position on that map, leaving Scutum-Centaurus arm: <a href="https://medium.com/timematters/gift-from-zeta-reticuli-ceebf919b191">Learn More</a>