system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
What is our solar systems orientation as we travel around the Milky Way? Are other solar systems the same?

Knowing that the north star doesn't move, my guess is that we are either spinning like a frisbee with matching planes to the Milky Way, or tilted 90 degrees to the Milky Ways plane.
gpt
So, within the Solar System, things tend to all rotate the same way. The Moon orbits the Earth on a plane that's very close to the plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. The Earth rotates in the same direction too. There are exceptions, but this is what happens in general.

The Solar System all rotates the same way because it all formed from a single rotating clump of gas. As this gas fragmented, the chunks would all be rotating the same way too. So you get things all going the same way, more or less. Collisionless between objects can change things up a bit.

But with the Milky Way it's quite different. A group of stars will form from a cloud of gas, but this cloud is very small compared to the size of the Milky Way. On that scale, the rotation of the Milky Way doesn't matter - instead, we're small enough that random turbulent motions really matter. Overall, the gas in the Milky Way is quite hot and turbulent - it's not a nice dense smoothly rotating disc, like the early Solar System.

So star-forming clouds seem to have almost completely random rotations - if they're rotating at all. Within a star-forming cloud itself, there is even more turbulence. This cloud will collapse into a number of little clumps, all with basically random orientations. Each of these clumps is small enough and dense enough to have consistent rotation within itself, so each of these clumps will form a star system that rotates consistently, but there's little or no connection between the rotation of one star system with another.

So, basically, star systems seem to rotate pretty much randomly.

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For our own Solar System, you can actually see the angle pretty clearly at night. All the planets, the Moon, and the Sun all orbit in basically the same plane - the "ecliptic". This is the plane of our solar system. If you go out at night with a star map, you can try to spot it. All of the astrological constellations are along the ecliptic too, so if you find Gemini, Scorpio etc, that's the plane of the solar system.

The plane of the Milky Way is, of course, the Milky Way. So you can look up and compare those fairly easily.

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**The numbers:** the Earth's rotation is 24° from the plane of its orbit around the Sun (the ecliptic). The ecliptic is 60° from the Milky Way plane.