December 21, 2012 - Question?

Question

Hi I'm a student and I figured that all the 'doomsday' stuff was a load of c**p; however, I wanted to know if the Milky Way/Sun alignment will produce any cool visuals.. like an aurora? Or, will anything else happen (and I'm NOT referring to the world exploding.)

Answer 1

Short answer is no.

I am not totally sure what people even mean by the Milky Way / Sun alignment. The Milky Way completely surrounds our solar system. The core of the galaxy, which contains a massive black hole, is in the constellation Sagittarius. The Sun is seen in that direction every year in December. That is what astrologers (yes, I am talking about astrology, as in horoscopes, here) mean when they say your sign is Sagittarius, that the Sun is seen in that part of the sky on your birthday. So every December you could say the Sun lines up with the center of the galaxy. But that is every year, not just 2012. So I don't know what the big deal is. But I have seen astrologers post here saying other interesting events will happen that year. I don't recall what they all are, but they involve this or that planet appearing close to another in the sky or in certain constellations, which they call significant, and they happen in 2012, so they say this supports these 2012 stories. Astrologers care about stuff like that. I don't though.

Answer 2

No, the "alignment" won't do anything.  Because it won't occur - our solar system isn't angled that way.

And the Milky Way centre is 25,000 light years away, hidden behind huge clouds of dust and gas - we can't see the centre from Earth without special instruments.

Even if the "alignment" could occur, it can't do anything - there is no cosmic energy field waiting for the Earth, sun, and the galactic centre to line up in a particular way.

Answer 3

In spite of what all the money-grabbing writers and TV producers want you to believe, 2012 will be awesomely mundane and astronomically forgetable.

Answer 4

I don't think anyone knows what they're really talking about when they claim there will be a some kind of galaxy alignment 12/21/2012.  I've only heard info about such an alignment from the wackos themselves, and they never get too specific about it.

Answer 5

First of all I want to say "way to go" for using the brains that the Good Lord gave you and realizing that all this 2012 stuff is a crock of something that is not desireable.  

Alignments of stars, planets, the moon, other moons, and groupings of several of these, happen all the time.  You need to realize that the alignment is only from the perspective of our location on the planet Earth.   If you were to stand on another planet or in a different place in our galaxy, the same exact objects would no longer be in alignment.  they are very cool to look at and to photograph, but they don't create any wierd pull or effects or anything more than just something nice to look at.  

Auroras are the by product of solar ejections and solar winds and they can happen all the time too.  Here are two sites that have lots of things you can look at, read about, and learn  regarding optical and cellestial events.  I hope that you enjoy these.  

http://www.spaceweather.com

http://www.atoptics.co.uk/

Answer 6

What will happen on December 31, 2012? Not a d**n thing.

That date is approximately the end of the current era (or ba'k'tun) of the Mayan calendar. That calendar was studied extensively (from the original Mayan hieroglyphics, which he could read and understand) by the brilliant Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman; he says that while the Mayan calendar is very accurate, it is totally ad hoc — it has NO theoretical basis whatsoever, and thus has no predictive power whatsoever. So the end of the current ba'k'tun has no extrinsic significance at all.