by Anthony Barreiro » Mon Oct 22, 2012 6:42 pm
Chris Peterson wrote:
Why? There's no galactic mechanism that dictates the orientation of planetary systems- that's determined by the local angular momentum of protostellar nebulas. So to me, there's nothing curious or surprising at all about the inclination of our own system.
Like most people, I unconsciously assume that I'm standing still on a flat plane at the center of the universe, with everything moving around me. For me, curiosity and surprise arise whenever that assumption is overturned and I'm able to get my head around a bigger reality. Even knowing that the Earth is a sphere orbiting the Sun, it's still surprising to truly understand that the plane of Earth's rotation is inclined relative to the plane of her orbit around the Sun. And it's a big step to understand that the ecliptic plane of our one small solar system is oriented essentially randomly relative to the plane of the Milky Way galaxy's disk. Gaining a rough comprehension of our local group, with the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies being slowly drawn toward one another, blows my mind (by the way, Andromeda is visible in Babak's image, to the right of the Milky Way, about halfway from the center toward 1 o'clock). Looking through a telescope at the big galaxies in the middle of the Virgo galaxy cluster or the galaxies toward Ursa Major, trying to imagine light travelling through space for 50 million or 100 million years, is about the limit of my comprehension. When astrophysicists start talking about redshifts and cosmic expansion, I think of Wordsworth's
Intimations of Immortality.
Perhaps our capacity for surprise and wonder is a personal quality, like a taste for spicy food, or long Romantic poems.
[quote="Chris Peterson"][quote="Ann"]And it is curiously funny, isn't it, that [url=http://astrobob.areavoices.com/files/2011/04/Solar-system-in-milky_way-400x158.jpg]the plane of our solar system is so strongly inclined to the of the disk of the Milky Way[/url].[/quote]
Why? There's no galactic mechanism that dictates the orientation of planetary systems- that's determined by the local angular momentum of protostellar nebulas. So to me, there's nothing curious or surprising at all about the inclination of our own system.[/quote]
Like most people, I unconsciously assume that I'm standing still on a flat plane at the center of the universe, with everything moving around me. For me, curiosity and surprise arise whenever that assumption is overturned and I'm able to get my head around a bigger reality. Even knowing that the Earth is a sphere orbiting the Sun, it's still surprising to truly understand that the plane of Earth's rotation is inclined relative to the plane of her orbit around the Sun. And it's a big step to understand that the ecliptic plane of our one small solar system is oriented essentially randomly relative to the plane of the Milky Way galaxy's disk. Gaining a rough comprehension of our local group, with the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies being slowly drawn toward one another, blows my mind (by the way, Andromeda is visible in Babak's image, to the right of the Milky Way, about halfway from the center toward 1 o'clock). Looking through a telescope at the big galaxies in the middle of the Virgo galaxy cluster or the galaxies toward Ursa Major, trying to imagine light travelling through space for 50 million or 100 million years, is about the limit of my comprehension. When astrophysicists start talking about redshifts and cosmic expansion, I think of Wordsworth's [url=http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15926][i]Intimations of Immortality[/i][/url].
Perhaps our capacity for surprise and wonder is a personal quality, like a taste for spicy food, or long Romantic poems.