![]() At the closest point in its orbit, it is 4.4 billion kilometers (2.75 billion miles) away, and at the farthest point, it is some 7.29 billion kilometers (4.53 billion miles) away. The Sun itself is bobbing up and down in a vertical motion in and out of midplane of our galactic disk almost like a cork in water.Īlthough recent estimates put our position as some 81 light-years above the midplane of the galaxy, in fact, Reid puts that figure at only 20 light years above the plane.īlitz says that once the Sun hits a height of some 300 light years above the galactic plane, it will begin its descent back down through the midplane, out the other side and then back up again. And our star’s journey up, down and around will continue just as it has for the last 4.6 billion years.Ultimately, this tiny world is an average of 5.91 billion kilometers (3.67 billion miles) away from the Sun. The aforementioned Giant Molecular Clouds (GMCs) which pepper the plane of our galaxy have over time have also altered our solar system’s angle in relation to the galactic plane. Thus, the plane of our own solar system lies perpendicular to the galactic plane at an angle of some 60 percent. And that too is thought to be a dynamic number. The whole solar system is angled perpendicular to the plane of the galaxy. NASA, JPL-Caltech, Susan Stolovy (SSC/Caltech) et al. It’s hard to know how far the Sun has moved from the molecular cloud from which it formed since it has long been dispersed, astronomer Leo Blitz, a professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, told me. But he still wonders whether we have always been at this distance from the galactic center.īlitz says it’s possible that the Sun may have formed closer in towards the galactic center and over the eons migrated outward into our present location. As to why that might be? That’s in part because of random interactions with other stars. The Sun lies between two spiral arms Sagittarius and Perseus very close to a minor spur of the Milky Way known as the so-called Local Arm (or the Orion-Cygnus arm). The Sun is thought to have formed pretty near its current position The other involves meticulous radio observations of this supermassive black hole in our galactic center. This method involves taking distance measurements of how SGR A* moves in comparison to background quasars that lie billions of light years away. This enables astronomers to accurately calculate the Sun’s distance from SGR A* with a great degree of precision. Reid says astronomers primarily use two methods to determine the Sun’s distance to the galactic center. One involves infrared observations of stars that orbit the supermassive black hole dubbed Sagittarius A* (SGR A*) which lies in our Milky Way’s galactic center. Recent estimates place the Sun an estimated 26,600 light years from the Milky Way’s galactic center. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |