The Great Alignment

     There's something wrong with the night sky. Something very, very wrong. Most people say that our solar system is part of the Milky Way galaxy and while it's true that the Milky Way galaxy is the largest galaxy near us and that we are sort of orbiting it, we are not actually part of the Milky Way Galaxy… yet.

     About 10 years ago they were doing surveys of the sky using infrared and various other spectrums and were able to assemble stars that were considered red giants, and plot them out, and a string of red giants appeared orbiting perpendicular to the equatorial plane of the Milky Way galaxy. And it showed that we were in this group of stars characterized by the perpendicular orbit and the red giants, and they were being drawn in from another galaxy outside of the Milky Way.

     Our home galaxy is known as the Dwarf Sagittarius Elliptical galaxy, elliptical because it forms a big ellipse orbiting the Milky Way galaxy but around the poles, not the equator. But we are close to the equatorial plane of the Milky Way galaxy, we are just north of it, and are headed into it. Where exactly are we? It's hard to tell, it almost looks like we're already in the equatorial plane.

     How do we know that we're not in the equatorial plane of the Milky Way galaxy? Because if you look at the stars in an area without light pollution, on a cloudless night with no moon you should be able to see the Milky Way Galaxy, a bright smear across the sky. The problem? If our home galaxy was the Milky Way galaxy, the equatorial plane of our solar system would line up with the equatorial plane of the Milky Way galaxy, and the Moon, Sun and planets would all follow the Milky Way in the sky, not the current path across the sky, which is essentially perpendicular. The star constellations that form the background for the passage of the moon and planets are called the zodiac, so the zodiac is the current path for the equatorial plane of our solar system.

     A long time in the future, around 20 million years from now when we do enter the equatorial plane of the Milky Way galaxy, we can assume that we will not make it out the other side to orbit around again because only 30% of the red giants make it through, and since our star is smaller than a red giant, it will be swept away with the flow of material in an outer spiral arm of the Milky Way galaxy, which is moving at something along the lines of 200 million miles a second and has gravity that is estimated to be 10 times higher than where we are now. Hopefully we won't notice that, and it won't be brutal, and all we will notice is that one night somewhere on Earth people will look up and see the visible planets and the moon suddenly rotate to line up with the Milky Way galaxy and from that point forward, the planets, the moon, and the Sun will all travel along the Milky Way, as the equatorial plane of our solar system and the Milky Way galaxy align. I call it The Great Alignment.