When Dinosaurs Roamed the Planet, Earth was on the Other Side of the Galaxy

Besides the asteroid that brought their demise almost 65 million years ago, it is quite hard to find any links between space and dinosaurs.

For the past decade, researchers studied the rate at which planets form and evolve in the galaxy while also analyzing data obtained by exoplanet hunters among which we can count the Kepler, K2, and TESS initiatives.

During a recent stargazing party, the researcher offered interesting information about the stars that can be seen in the sky. At that moment the stargazers admired the Pleiades, a cluster of bright stars that are some of the youngest visible objects on the sky during the night.

They are 13 million years old but quite long in comparison to many of the other stars which are visible within the solar system. It is easy to observe that the dinosaurs wouldn’t have been able to see these stars during the night since they disappeared long before the stars formed.

It is also important to take into account the fact that the sky we see today is not the sky that was visible millions of years ago as our solar system orbits the Milky Way and will move over time. To illustrate her pint the researcher created an animation that shows our solar system as it orbits around the galaxy.

By watching the animation, we learn that the sun needs 200 to 250 million years to orbit around the center of the galaxy, a large spiral that leads into the hungry maw of a giant black hole. According to the current position in the galaxy an orbit has been completed.

The last time when we were in this section, the galaxy, the earliest dinosaurs started to roam the earth during the Triassic period, but it is important to note that we are not in the position is not exactly the same.