'Vortex' Solar System Model Is Unsettlingly Unfamiliar (VIDEO)

Sorry, But You Don't Know What The Solar System Looks Like

You don't know what the Solar System looks like.

That's the message of a new video which asks its viewers to reconsider their basic image of the sun and the planets.

Traditionally our Solar System is pictures as a flat disc with the Sun at the centre and the planets rotating around it. This is known as the 'heliocentric' model, and... it's wrong.

In fact the Sun itself is moving at about 70,000 kilometres-per-hour - and so do we.

And if you use this fact to imagine a new, simplified model of our movement in space, you get something quite different - a vortex, with the sun swinging around the galaxy and ourselves following behind, barrelling round in its wake.

Unfortunately it's not quite that simple either. For one thing it's all a matter of relative movement, which gets us into tricky territory cosmologically speaking. In addition, the maker of the video has had to release a second one to address some concerns - in particular that the original is not to scale.

Still, both are worth a watch - take a look:

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