Oh, one of my favorite subjects.
I know this video but the theory behind is implausible IMHO. But did you know that our solar system is not aligned exactly at 90° to the galactic plane but is rather inclined "obliquely"? The first attached image is how it looks from the direction of the galactic center (the attached picture is from
here, an interesting page). You can see it in the
Space Simulator, too, which simulates the inclination correct. And we are moving around the galactic center, but as far as I have understood that we are not really moving away from it, the solar system is moving only up and down through the galactic plane. And the speed is INCREDIBLE fast. Think about this:
Let's start with how fast the earth spins
The earth has a circumference of 40,075 kilometres at the equator. At the equator, the earth has a circumference of 40,075 kilometres. This means that you permanently move with a speed of almost 1670 km/h from west to east. That's one and a half times the speed of sound! Don't you notice? Because everything around you on Earth is moving as fast as you, you will not notice a thing.
But the rotation speed of the earth is nothing compared to how fast the earth orbits around the sun. In a mean distance of almost 150 million kilometres, we circle around the sun once within a year. That makes a cruising speed of 107.280 km/h. This is faster than the NASA probe New Horizons which explored Pluto.
But let's go on. The earth orbits with the solar system the center of the Milky Way. At an incredible speed of 900,000 km/h! And our home galaxy is traveling at 1,987,000 km/h, relatively seen to the cosmic background radiation. In comparison to the speed of light (1.079.252.848,8 km/h), however, this is still slow.
Why do we don't notice this? Well, that's because, as Einstein said, everything is relative. We are like a fly flying around in a moving car. She doesn't notice anything - and neither we do. This is great, isn't it?
But there is more to know. For the historical movement of the sun I have another small excursion for you. The sun did not originate where it is today and most of the neighbouring stars are only our neighbours, but not our siblings (scientists can derive that information from their observations and calculations today).
- at the beginning the sun was in a star formation area (cluster)
- this star cluster must have had at least 2,000 stars and a maximum of 100,000 stars
- at the time of formation there must have been 10,000-100,000 stars in their immediate vicinity
- and there were a lot of "fly-bys" of other young stars
- the sun must then have been about 1 light year away from a supernova explosion
- the exploded star had about 25 solar masses, so it was quite big
- this is how most of the planets of our solar system known today (and also us) came into being
- the cluster then dissolves over time and the stars "went their own ways".
- due to the increasing distance to other stars the planetary orbits remained stable until today
The stars of the birth cluster of the Sun have been widely distributed over the last 4 billion years and today we are in a region of the Milky Way that differs significantly from the environment of the Sun at the time of its formation. As far as I know, the origin of the sun has not been clearly identified until today, for a while it was thought that it was born in the star cluster M67, but has now been refuted.
In this document there is a list of candidates whose composition is very similar to that of the sun, i.e. they seem to come from the same star forge, the so-called "Solar Sibling Candidates", siblings of the sun. However, many of them are smaller M dwarves. But the next time you look up to Vega, there is the star
HD 162826 - an old friend of the Sun.
Our current situation is like that: our solar system is currently "embedded" in the
Local Bubble - an area of relatively low density interstellar matter measuring about 300 light years in diameter. At first it was thought that a supernova explosion and the formation of the pulsar "Geminga" had to do with it. Meanwhile it is assumed that a whole series of supernovae (14-20) in the last 15 million years are responsible for this.
Inside this local bubble, the solar system is currently ("currently is a cosmic wink, which still about 70,000 years!) crossing an area called the "local flake". This is an area where in a cube of ten centimeters edge length there are only 100 atoms - interstellar clouds are usually 100 times as dense. The local flake is about 7,000 degrees Kelvin hot and the local bubble even up to 1,000,000 Kelvin! There are studies on the subject that we could cross such a hot region in 100 years from now. The temperatures sound spectacular, but the specific heat capacity of the medium has to do with the density, so we - respectively our descendants - won't notice that.
So much for that. Sorry that I had to be brief
And: "The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be." (Douglas Adams) So don't panic!
