"Soon after he joined the Leiden faculty in 1926, Dr. Oort obtained the first direct observational evidence of the Milky Way's rotation. Through complex complex calculations, he measured the relative velocities of stars moving with the rotating galaxy and deduced their distances from the galactic center. In this way, he determined that the Sun and its planets were not even close to the galaxy's center but 30,000 light years away, in the galactic hinterland, traveling an orbit of that center that takes 300 million years to complete."
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Jan Oort
Jan Hendrik Oort (28 April 1900 – 5 November1992) was a Dutch astronomer.
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