What is the Galactic Alignment?
The following is a question being asked on Yahoo Answers. Both the questions and answers given do not reflect the view of our website.
Question:
can any one explain me about this…i saw one of the documentry saying that 2012 is end of the world…there will be galactical alighnment…
they lied.
it should make you upset that someone pretended to be explaining something and lied to you instead.
there is no particular alignment, no more so than any Dec 21, but even if every planet lined up perfectly in a row with the line pointing right at the center of the Milky Way… just WTF do you expect to happen?
sheeesh.
There is no galactic alignment. One of the claims of the 2012 hoaxers is that the Sun will align with the center of the galaxy in 2012. This is not true.
Another claim is that the planets will align at that time. It is also untrue. The only planetary alignments we have are what appear to be alignment in our view of the sky. This is not an alignment in space and has no effect on us.
“First of all, it is impossible for all the planets to form a straight line out from the Sun (or viewed superimposed on each other in the sky) because each planetary orbit is tilted slightly (and sometimes not slight at all in the case of Pluto) (no longer a planet, but still in the Solar System) with respect to the Earth’s orbit (whose plane we trace out on the night sky as a line completely around the sky and is called the ecliptic). These zealots confuse the term planetary alignment with the more accurate words that should be used, planetary configuration or a loose grouping of the planets in the sky. Actually the event that occurred in 1983 was that the planets (all eight of them — we are on the ninth, Earth) would be within 96° of each other in the sky — not in a straight line as most people would misinterpret with the term alignment.
The last series of planetary configurations or perhaps more accurately called multiple planetary conjunctions occurred in the year 2000. Did the Earth tilt over? No. Did tidal forces trigger earthquakes? No. Did the polar ice caps melt? No. Were you even be able to see the conjunctions? Not really.”
Galactic alignment is an invention by a bunch of crackpots in order to conjure up some sort of ‘event’ for 2012. Since they seem unable to provide a concise definition, we’ll have to try and guess what they mean.
Could it be the Sun aligning with the centre of the Milky Way galaxy? Well, no because the centre of the Milky Way is not in the plane of the Earth’s orbit, so the Sun can never line up with it.
Could they mean the Sun crossing the equator of the Milky Way? The Sun does a complete circuit of the sky every year and therefore appears in line with the Milky Way in June and December every year. So that can’t be right.
What about the once in 26,000 year alignment of the solstice point with the galactic equator? Nope, that took place in 1998.
All the preceding are merely line-of-sight effects as seen from the earth’s perspective. An observer on Mars would see something completely different. Some of the cranks have become confused and decided that galactic alignment must be something to do with the revolution of the whole solar system around the galaxy, taking 225 million years. During this orbit, the solar system bobs up and down a few times and measurements taken from the Hipparcos satellite reveal that the solar system is currently moving away from the central plane of the galaxy and won’t pass through it for another 30 million years or so. That can’t be what they mean then.
So we have: 1) Can’t ever happen 2) Happens every year 3) Happened in 1998 or 4) Won’t happen for 30 million years.
Take your pick.