Banned
How far along is the sun in its wobbling up and down motion around the Galaxy. I understand that once it leaves the edge we'll be exposed to a lot of hard radiation normally shielded from us by the mass of the Galaxy. just wondering whether to renew my subscription to scientific american.
Established Member
Where do you gain this understanding from?
The dog, the dog, he's at it again!
Administrator
The wobble has about a 25 million year period, but at the maximum excursion from the galactic plane, we aren't exposed to radiation that will significantly alter (or worse yet penetrate) our atmosphere. We've been in that region for 6 million year periods (roughly) every 12 million years for the last 4.6 billion years. Life has gone on. Scientific American will continue to publish.
Forming opinions as we speak
Established Member
It is likely that life will be harder when we are closer to the Galactic plane, because the increased concentration of collision hazards near the galactic plane is significantly higher than the change in radiation exposure.
Banned
There was something about it on tv I think. Some scientists think it might be the cause of mass extinctions.
Member
I believe you are talking about Michael Rampino, who still stubbornly believes the notion that mass extinctions re-occur regularly every 26 million years, even though it has been shown that the pattern of mass extinctions is essentially random.Originally Posted by Parallel Universes
Order of Kilopi
I doubt any real scientists seriously entertain the idea, at least not specialists in the field. Mass extinctions don't happen like clockwork, they happen irregularly and at much larger intervals. There were suggestions that mass extinctions correlated with the Solar system passing through the galactic plane through an arm, due to factors like the higher rate of supernovas in the arms, but the actual numbers don't show any such correlations.
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