Is this quote from Monty Python correct?

     "The sun and you and me
     And all the stars that we can see
     Are moving at a million miles a day
     In an outer spiral arm at 40 000 miles an hour
     Of the galaxy we call the Milky Way
     ...
     We're thirty thousand light years
     From the galactic central point;
     We go around every two hundred million years"
The speed of the Sun around the Galactic center is about 260 kilometers/sec give or take. This works out to 1.4 million miles per day, but that is 600,000 miles per hour, not 40,000! The rest of the quote seems roughly correct, although the current best distance estimate is now about 8,000 parsecs or 26,000 light years. This means that to cover the circumference of the circle 8,000 parsecs in radius, the total distance is about 9.6x10^17 miles, and this takes about 285 million years.
Copyright 1997 Dr. Sten Odenwald
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