Cataclysmic Orbit -Our Solar System's Journey Through the Milky Way

[n2doc]

Is there a genocidal countdown built into the motion of our solar system? Recent work at Cardiff University suggests that our system's orbit through the Milky Way encounters regular speedbumps - and by "speedbumps" we mean "potentially extinction-causing asteroids".


Professor William Napier and Dr Janaki Wickramasinghe have completed computer simulations of the motion of the Sun in our outer spiral-arm location in the Milky Way (image left of spiral arms).

These models reveal a regular oscillation through the central galactic plane, where the surrounding dust clouds are the densest. The solar system is a non-trivial object, so its gravitational effects set off a far-reaching planetoid-pinball machine which often ends with comets hurled into the intruding system.

The sun is about 26,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, which is about 80,000 to 120,000 light-years across (and less than 7,000 light-years thick). We are located on on one of its spiral arms, out towards the edge. It takes the sun -and our solar system- roughly 200-250 million years to orbit once around the Milky Way. In this orbit, we are traveling at a velocity of about 155 miles/sec (250 km/sec).
more:
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2008/09/cataclysmic-orb.html

[Indenturedebtor]

1. Well we'd better be ready with our space program to deflect asteroids and comets

Or we're toast.

[Odin2005]

2. Most scientists consider the "cyclical mass extinctions" hypothesis to be nonsense.

They are seeing cyclical patterns in the extinction rate data that doesn't really exist, it's statistical noise.