The Sun lies at or near the center of the Milky Way.

Astronomers tried to map the Milky Way long before they could see through its dust. Star counts seemed like an obvious method: measure how many stars were visible in different directions and infer the shape of the surrounding stellar system.

That approach produced models, such as Jacobus Kapteyn’s, in which the Sun sat close to the center.

The hidden bias was interstellar extinction. Dust along the galactic plane blocks distant starlight, making the observable stellar distribution look smaller and more locally centered than the Galaxy really is.

Harlow Shapley approached the problem differently. He mapped the distribution of globular clusters and found that they were concentrated toward Sagittarius rather than around the Sun.

The implication was radical: the Milky Way was much larger than many earlier estimates, and the Sun occupied an off-center position in its disk.

Shapley’s own distance scale was not perfectly correct, but the displacement was.

Modern measurements place the Solar System roughly 26,000 light-years from the galactic center. We orbit the center rather than occupying it.