Tomasz April 20, 2012, 11:28:44

Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is a band of stars all anourd the sky. The Sun completes a circuit of the sky every year. It therefore follows that the Sun will appear in line with the Milky Way twice a year. It last happened on 21st December 2008. Did you notice any cataclysmic events on that day? I thought not. Ah! say the 2012 doommongers. In 2012 there will be an exact alignment between the Sun, the solstice point and the central plane of the Milky Way . Err.. actually no. The solstice was in line with the Milky Way’s central plane back in 1998, when nobody had thought of any of this 2012 nonsense. Any cataclysmic events back then? Of course not.Some 2012 doommongers confuse the aforementioned alignments, which are purely unimportant line-of-sight effects, with the real physical passage of the solar system through the central plane of the Milky Way galaxy. In the course of our 225 million year orbit of the galaxy, we bob up and down a few times, but the next central plane passage won’t be for another 30 million years or so.