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Sunday, June 8, 2014

Milky Way Spirals Correlate with Life's Extinctions and Explosions

Since we are inside of our galaxy, it is difficult to imagine how our spiral galaxy, the Milky Way, looks from the outside. People have put together this diagram of what our galaxy would look like from above the plane of its disk. The sun is at the top of a dashed-yellow 225 million year orbit around the galaxy center. The sun's journey through the galaxy spiral features seems to correlate with various explosions and extinctions of life on earth as shown.

Although the correlation is not perfect, it is very suggestive that changes in our sun's luminosity occur during spiral transits and those changes result in changes in solar irradiance and therefore in earth's climate. Since spiral wave transits also affects the convective cooling of gravitationally compressed matter, spiral transits also impact earth's magma motion and tectonics and volcanism. There are also more gravitational perturbations within a spiral wave and more young stars with more gamma radiation.