The Galactic Year: A Neat Coincidence With Caveats

Once every 230 million years or so, the Sun completes a vast circuit around the heart of the Milky Way — and the last time it had traveled this far, the earliest dinosaurs were quietly taking their first steps on a Triassic Earth. It is the kind of cosmic coincidence that invites wonder, yet the numbers carry uncertainties wide enough to swallow entire geological epochs, and the notion that the Solar System has simply 'come back around' misreads how galaxies actually move. The universe does not repeat itself so neatly; it only occasionally rhymes.