Spanning the whole galaxy, moving at 828,000 km/h around the supermassive black hole at its center, Galactic Tick Day celebrates our progress around the Milky Way. It is humanity’s first holiday designed to raise awareness about our fascinating journeying around our galaxy.
The time needed for our solar system to move around the galactic center is roughly 225 million years. Galactic Tick Day occurs on a regular interval of 1.7361 years, called a Galactic Tick, and it represents 1/129,600,000 (one centi-arcsecond) of our solar system’s orbit around that black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
Most people have a good sense of the motion of our solar system because it is a fundamental part of our lives. The rotation of the Earth makes for day and night; our planet’s revolution around the sun marks a year. But fewer Earthlings grasp the larger picture — that our solar system is just one among billion others, orbiting a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. And where the sun goes, we go too.
Galactic Tick Day was created by a group of science enthusiasts. David Sneider, one of the creators, said the motivation for inventing this new holiday is “kind of loosely defined,” but mainly the group hopes it will simply bring awe and excitement to people’s lives.
“All of these scientific facts, when you put them together and start synthesizing [them] it becomes very invigorating,” Sneider told Space.com. “Given this expanse and this spaciousness in which we find ourselves — and you can picture in your mind’s eye the Earth as the pale blue dot — when you start going down that line you really get these nice feelings and understanding that we are a human family. This is a planetary society. Whether we like it or not we’re all in it together. And to be able to have that level of conversation and kind of see people arrive at insights similar to that through science education is really amazing.”
The first Galactic Tick Day took place one galactic tick after Hans Lippershey filed the patent for the telescope on 2 October, 1608. The first observance of the holiday was on 29 September 2016, the 235th Galactic Tick Day.
This is also the day Thy Veils joined the celebration.