 - Last login: 10 hours agoTapwaterJ
- David is a 54 year old married guy from Chapel Hill, Way South of, Iceland.
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- Member since Mar 20, 2007
In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot people very angry and has been widely regarded as a bad move. - Douglas Adams.
This blog is a simple reflection of the fact that, if I were a cat, I'd be dead.
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Cataclysmic Clockwork -Our Solar Systems Deadly Orbit Through the Milky Way
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May 7, 12:54pm
4 reviews
•http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/...
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Cataclysmic Clockwork
Our Solar System's Deadly Orbit Through the Milky Way
The Daily Galaxy, Luke McKinney
 "Is there a genocidal countdown built into the motion of our solar system? Recent work at Cardiff University suggests that our system's orbit through the Milky Way encounters regular speedbumps - and by "speedbumps" we mean "potentially extinction-causing asteroids".
Professor William Napier and Dr Janaki Wickramasinghe have completed computer simulations of the motion of the Sun in our outer spiral-arm location in the Milky Way.
These models reveal a regular oscillation through the central galactic plane, where the surrounding dust clouds are the densest. The solar system is a non-trivial object, so its gravitational effects set off a far-reaching planetoid-pinball machine which often ends with comets hurled into the intruding system.
The sun is about 26,000 light-years from the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, which is about 80,000 to 120,000 light-years across (and less than 7,000 light-years thick). We are located on one of its spiral arms, out towards the edge. It takes the sun - and our solar system - roughly 200-250 million years to orbit once around the Milky Way. In this orbit, we are traveling at a velocity of about 155 miles/sec (250 km/sec).
Many of the ricocheted rocks collide with planets on their way through our system, including Earth. Impact craters recorded worldwide show correlations with the ~37 million year-cycle of these journeys through the galactic plane - including the vast impact craters thought to have put an end to the dinosaurs two cycles ago."
Asteroid Insurance
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