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Originally posted by badw0lf
According to the OP, our galaxy is the Sagittarius galaxy, which on collision with the Milky Way has left us ensnared in one of the spirals of it.
So we're the Sagittariuns.. Invading the larger and cannibal milky way galaxy!
A website called Viewzone recently posted an article claiming that scientists have determined the Sun is not native to the Milky Way Galaxy, but instead was absorbed by the Milky Way while eating a smaller dwarf galaxy.
A website called Viewzone recently posted an article claiming that scientists have determined the Sun is not native to the Milky Way Galaxy, but instead was absorbed by the Milky Way while eating a smaller dwarf galaxy.
There’s just one eensy weensy problem with this: it’s totally wrong.
See, there was this paper in the Astrophysical Journal way back in 2003. Full citation is: Majewski, Steven R.; Skrutskie, M. F.; Weinberg, Martin D. et al, “A 2MASS All-Sky View of the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy: I. Morphology of the Sagittarius Core and Tidal Arms”, The Astrophysical Journal 599 1082 (2003). There’s a preprint online (PDF), if you’re curious about the whole thing… what it basically says is: the Milky Way is currently in the process of devouring a small, nearby elliptical galaxy, the Sagittarius Dwarf Elliptical Galaxy (short form: Sag DEG). The trail of debris from this encounter—a trail of stars ripped out of the Sag DEG by the Milky Way—is a big, long curving thingy that passes right through the disk of the Milky Way—and among the cool things about this: that tail of debris passes fairly close to our current position in the disk.
There’s a pattern, I might add, to a certain form of pseudoscience. It has a way of starting from something already rather cool (those facts, up there above, from the paper), and trying to ‘improve’ upon them, make them cooler still. It’s sort of a fish story phenomenon. No matter how big the fish is you’ve caught, you always want to tell people it’s just that little bit bigger, at least…
the sun orbits the nucleus of the Milky Way in the plane of the Milky Way’s disk, just like the vast majority of its neighbours, exactly unlike members of the Sag DEG stream.
Originally posted by poet1b
reply to post by Blarneystoner
Actually our solar system is moving across the solar plane, not necessarily around it. It is ( or was ) believed that we orbit the center of our galaxy in a sinusoidal pattern, but that is only a theory that at a certain point the direction our solar system is moving will change.
www.astro.ncu.edu.tw...
...the close proximity of SagDEG has also affected the Milky Way's spiral disk, warping it like an old-fashioned phonograph record left out in the hot sun