reply to post by SunnyDee
Three things you might want to review and get at least a basic understanding of:
Orbital Mechanics,
Gravitation, and
Escape Velocity.
First, the 26,000 year "changing of the constellations" that you're thinking of is called
Precession, and it's not an orbit, it's the changing of the orientation of a spinning axis of an
object. Specifically, the Earth's rotational axis.
Next, to give you an idea about orbits:
Each planet that orbits our sun does so at a certain velocity. The closer you are to the sun and orbit it, the faster the velocity is. For example:
Mercury Orbital Velocity: 47 km/s
Venus Orbital Velocity: 35 km/s
Earth Orbital Velocity: 29 km/s
Mars Orbital Velocity: 24 km/s
By the time you get to Neptune, it's orbital velocity is: 5.4 km/s
The way orbital mechanics and gravitation works is, the further away you get from another object's gravity well, the less velocity it takes to escape
from it. If Neptune were to some how speed up to say Mercury's orbital velocity of 47 km/s, it would leave our solar system, never to orbit the sun
again.
Now, our sun is moving at 220 km/s in relation to the center of the Milky Way galaxy. NGChunter showed that at almost 400 light years away from
Alcyone, which masses 10 times more than the sun (that gives us what type of gravitational force it is), showed that at this distance from it, any
velocity greater than 0.22 km/2 is more than enough to be escape velocity.
In other words, our sun can not orbit Alcyone simply because
it's moving too fast to be in orbit around it!
It's called Physics, and it is very well understood. If it were not, then you would not be enjoying things like GPS, weather satellite images, etc,
etc. As we'd not be able to put things in orbit.
So I'm sorry, but yes: it's impossible for us to be orbiting that star.
As for the age of the star: it's called
Stellar Evolution and
Nuclear Fusion, and while yes, it is hard to know the exact age of a star, know both stellar
evolution and nuclear fusion, we can still be within the ball park. The site you linked even explains that.
As for our galaxy and understanding it: you linked to an article that talks about black holes. Not our galaxy.