“Within a galaxy, everything moves,” Rubin would write. “In the universe, all galaxies are in motion.” Every two minutes “the earth has moved 2500 miles as it orbits the sun; the sun has moved 20,000 miles as it orbits the distant center of our galaxy. In a 70-year lifespan, the sun moves 300,000,000,000 miles. Yet, this vast path is only a tiny arc of a single orbit: it takes 200,000,000 years for the sun to orbit once about the galaxy.” Yet such is the scale of the universe that astronomers don’t see galaxies actually rotating.
