Thread: Debunking The "End Of Days." (2012)

Originally Posted by Alextanium

It's pretty easy to determine where the galactic plane is. You can do it by looking up at the sky on a clear night and seeing the band of stars, the Milky Way. The area with the largest density of stars is the centre bulge of our galaxy.

I only remember hearing (off of Discovery channel again, hah) that because of our solar system's position in the spiral, there was no way to be sure of our orientation in relation to the center. I may absolutely be wrong. I have the great displeasure of living in Los Angeles, so the whole "clear night" scenario is never going to happen (not while I'm still living here, anyways) .

But here's my bigger question: Is the sun going to be dead-on-accurate exactly in between our sun and the black hole in the center of the galaxy? If that's the case, then we probably should be giving the Mayans a little more credit than that they just have a damn accurate calendar.

There is plenty of ways to be sure. We can calculate the distances to stars with a high degree of accuracy. Get the distances to enough stars and you can do some trigonometry to figure out where you are in relation to the rest.

It doesn't matter where in the spiral you are - if you can see the centre, you have a direct line of sight to it. Unless you're referring to whether the planet lies on the exact center of the Galactic Plane, in which case someone smarter than you or I seems to have figured it out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galactic_plane

And from the other wiki I posted a few up:

The fact that the Milky Way divides the night sky into two roughly equal hemispheres indicates that our Solar System lies close to the galactic plane. The Milky Way has a relatively low surface brightness, making it difficult to see from any urban or suburban location suffering from light pollution.

and

The Apex of the Sun's Way, or the solar apex, is the direction that the Sun travels through space in the Milky Way. The general direction of the Sun's galactic motion is towards the star Vega near the constellation of Hercules, at an angle of roughly 60 sky degrees to the direction of the Galactic Center. The Sun's orbit around the Galaxy is expected to be roughly elliptical with the addition of perturbations due to the galactic spiral arms and non-uniform mass distributions. In addition the Sun oscillates up and down relative to the galactic plane approximately 2.7 times per orbit. This is very similar to how a simple harmonic oscillator works with no drag force (damping) term. Due to the higher density of stars close to the galactic plane, these oscillations often coincide with mass extinction periods on Earth, presumably due to increased impact events.

It takes the Solar System about 225–250 million years to complete one orbit of the galaxy (a galactic year), so it is thought to have completed 20–25 orbits during the lifetime of the Sun and 1/1250th of a revolution since the origin of humans.