The planets orbit the Sun while the Sun orbits the centre of the Milky Way — so seen from the galaxy's reference frame, every planet traces a helix through space, not a closed ellipse. Both pictures are true: an orbit only looks closed if you travel along with the Sun. This is what relativity of motion actually feels like.
Earth orbits the Sun at about 30 km/s (107,000 km/h). The Sun carries the whole system around the galaxy at roughly 230 km/s (828,000 km/h) — one lap every ~230 million years. The last time we were on this side of the Milky Way, dinosaurs were the dominant life on Earth. The planetary plane is tilted about 60° to the galactic plane, and the Sun's direction of travel points ~60° out of the ecliptic — so the planets are sometimes ahead of the Sun, sometimes behind. It's a tilted helix, not the trailing "vortex" cone of internet fame. And it keeps going up: Andromeda falls toward the Milky Way at ~110 km/s (merger in ~4–5 billion years), the Local Group streams at ~600 km/s toward the Great Attractor, and against the cosmic microwave background — the afterglow of the Big Bang — we move at about 370 km/s: 1.3 million km/h. Pull back further still and whole clusters become grains in a web of filaments and voids — the observable universe, about 93 billion light-years across.
Planet sizes and orbital distances are compressed (the truth doesn't fit on a screen), the Moon is slowed down, and the Sun's default speed here is about one-twentieth of reality so the coils stay readable. Orbital period ratios are real. Drag the Sun-speed slider fully right for the true value — about 48 AU per year, more than seven Earth-orbit circumferences every single year — and watch the corkscrew stretch out toward a straight line.
Drag to look · scroll or pinch to zoom · double-tap for zen mode.