Will Galactic Alignment really accur, and if so, will it have any apocolyptic affects on the earth?

Question

I can't get a straight answer. It will occur, it wont occur, it will kill us all, we'll be fine. I just dont know whats going on with that.

Answer 1

First of all, what are you talking about?

Answer 2

The Milky Way apppears as a band of light around the sky. The plane of the Earth's orbit around the Sun is an imaginary line which also goes all around the sky and is inclined at an angle of about 60 degrees to the plane of the Milky Way. Therefore, as the Earth revolves around the Sun, twice a year the Sun appears, as seen from Earth, to spend a few days passing in front of this band of stars known as the Milky Way. This is what the 2012 cranks call "galactic alignment". They seem to overlook the fact that this phenomenon occurs every year and there is nothing special about 2012.

There is no scientific reason why anything at all should happen.

Answer 3

In a way, we are aligned with the Galactic Center all the time.  Try this experiment.  Draw a circle on a piece of paper.  Now place a dot in the center.  This picture represents the orbit of the Solar System around the Galaxy.  Now, anywhere on that orbit, can you see ANY point where it ISN'T aligned with the dot?  No, of course you can't, because ANY two points anywhere in the Universe are automatically aligned!  Don't worry, nothing bad is going to come leaping out of the cosmos to eat us up!

Answer 4

It has to occur eventually but that point could be past the death of the sun which will destroy the planets. So it is an unknown question of when it will happen.

No. We would be fine.

Answer 5

We pass through the galactic equator twice every year, as the earth's orbital inclination causes it to rise through then drop below the galactic equator.  And we seem to be fine so far, don't we?  Which makes sense, because there's absolutely no reason why it should affect life on earth at all.  The guy standing next to you has more gravitational pull on you than the galactic core does, and you don't get torn apart when you stand in a line of people.

Not to mention we're talking about very big scales here, plus we don't know enough about the precise shape of the galaxy to define an exact centerline, so anyone who claims to be able to narrow an alignment down to a single day is nuts.

Answer 6

"Will the Galactic Alignment really occur"

no

The sun's southernmost declination (always at the December solstice) is 23.4393 degrees South.  The Galactic centre is located at declination 29 deg. South.  The closest the Sun can get is (29 - 23.4393 =) 5.5607 degrees.  Hardly an alignment.

The galactic equator is an artificial line that we have drawn through the thickest past of the Milky Way, as a means to get a coordinate system based on the Galaxy (when comparing stars that are one one side with stars on the other side of the Galactic disk).  It is a great circle that goes all around the celestial sphere.

The ecliptic is the apparent yearly path of the Sun on the celestial sphere (it can also be seen as the projection of Earth's orbital plane on the celestial sphere).  It is also a great circle that goes all around the celestial sphere.

One of the first assignments in any spherical trigonometry course is to prove that any two distinct great circles on a sphere MUST cross twice.

Therefore, the Sun (running along the ecliptic) must cross the Galactic equator twice every year.  It just happens to be very close to the solstices (around June 21 and December 21) every year.

Even if there were an alignment, the next question is to ask: from what point of view?  If the prediction says that the Galactic black hole will use the alignment to do something to us, then we have to ask:  when will this alignment be seen from the black hole?  It is located 25,000 light years away, so that from the black hole's point of view, the Galactic Alignment will not happen until the year 27, 012 (give or take a few).

Even better: since the alignment occurs at least every 25,800 years, this means that the last one was seen only 800 years ago by the black hole (in the year 1212).  Maybe the world ended then and we no longer exist.