There was some article in the news about more BS circulating about 2012 relating to galactic alignment or something like that. I actually don’t want to even bother reading the full story explaining that its BS – I already know. But it did actually make me wonder about the plane of our galaxy vs. the plane that our Earth orbits the Sun in which is called the ecliptic plane.
What made me think of this? What made me think of this was this: when the Big Bang occurred, basically all this stuff exploded. At first there was just gas, then it condensed into vast clouds. Some of these clouds went on further to condense to form stars and other celestial bodies. First this massive exploding apart and then a congealing together. Out of that our galaxy – one of trillions in the Cosmos – eventually came into existence.
Our galaxy is a spiral galaxy and is disk-shaped. It has a big clump of matter near the middle – like a big ball – and then there’s this vast disk-shaped portion that extends out. Everyone knows this shape (except perhaps many kids in today’s deficient society).
So, inside this galaxy I already know that we’re located out in a spiral arm. But then I thought about how all the different stars in the galaxy have their own solar systems each with its own plane. Do those planes tend to align with the galactic one or are they more-or-less random? Reason would tell me that they would be more-or-less random. There seems to be no particularly good reason why their alignments would all be influenced by the galactic plane. If you could see an ultra-fast time lapse of our galaxy where the stars were all flying around, yes they’d all be pulled along by the spinning galactic disk, but each particular star would be spinning in its own way. What would influence the direction of spin and the ecliptic planes around all those stars would probably have much more to do with factors like how the gas which formed them initially collapsed, and perhaps other local gravitational influences. The influence of the galaxy would probably be quite small.
Curious then about the orientation of our planet’s ecliptic plane with the galactic plane I eventually came across this great animation. An animation speaks a thousand words. In this animation I really like how, towards the end of the animation when the Earth’s celestial north pole comes into view, one can clearly see the North Star in the Little Dipper. It turns out that the galactic plane is offset from the ecliptic by about 60 degrees.
Here’s a thread on a forum where someone explains what one would see on a summer’s night looking to the sky facing south. I’m copying this post below only because sites like this often disappear and then information gets lost.
The central region of the galaxy is in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius and not far from Scorpius. It is near them that the plane of the galaxy intersects the ecliptic (plane of Earth’s orbit) at an angle of about 60°. If the planes were nearly parallel, then we would see the Milky Way running through all of the constellations of the zodiac.
Picture a summer evening while the region between Sagittarius and Scorpius is crossing your southern meridian. The ecliptic would appear parallel to the horizon. You would observe the Milky Way sweeping upward at an angle of about 60° to the ecliptic.
You mention the Earth’s hemispheres, but they are separated by the Earth’s equatorial plane, not the ecliptic or galactic planes. The equatorial plane currently intersects the ecliptic plane at more than 23°. In the current era, the center of the galaxy is visible from the Earth’s South Pole and not the North Pole. That will eventually reverse due to precession. But in either case, observers on most of the Earth’s surface experience periods of the day during which the galactic center is above the horizon.
For astronomical graphics, including monthly wallpaper calendar, visit:
CurtRenz.com/astronomical
Curt Renz – “Centaur”
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