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Wednesday, December 7, 2011

"Are We Entering the Danger Zone?" The Solar System's 250-Million-Year Orbit Through the Milky Way

GalPlane_spitzer_f25
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 completed computer simulations of the motion of the Sun in our outer spiral-arm location in the Milky Way that revealed 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 being hurled into the intruding system.

Read More: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/12/are-we-entering-the-danger-zone-the-solar-systems-250-million-year-orbit-through-the-milky-way.html

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