Sun Trajectory in Milky Way
In “Time Matters” (free eBook in PDF, on Amazon and Google) we discussed that Sun left Scutum-Centaurus arm approximately 65M years ago (either by the yellow circular orbit charted in Wikipedia, or by the actual red orbit explained in the book) :
The same book explains that time in spiral arms runs a bit faster than outside the arms, and such time difference causes several effects, which led to the dinosaur extinction.
Time difference (in arms and outside the arms) curves trajectory of stars: they move like a fish school — often changing direction and velocity, amazingly synchronous, and without collisions. Check two-page explanation on “time dilation gradient” as the gravity. In the image below, red arrows show time dilation gradient (from faster time to slower time) at the border of Scutum-Centaurus arm:
Let’s see what happens to our Sun orbit when it crosses the arm borders by Wikipedia-claimed yellow circular orbit:
Orange marked circular speed is altered by the red gradient to the resulting speed in green. That explains following observations, which have baffled astronomers:
- When a star enters an arm, it “loses” its speed and “succumb” to the Newtonian pull from the galactic center: star “dives into the arm” toward the galactic center.
- On the contrary, when a star exits an arm, it is pushed away toward the galactic perimeter.
Similar changes in a satellite orbit, triggered by short-term boosts, are known among rocket scientists as “Hohmann transfer orbit”:
For a star in Milky Way or another spiral galaxy such boost comes from time dilation gradient at the border of the spiral arms. That explains observations done by international group of astronomers within RAVE (RAdial Velocity Experiment) project.
3. Stars do not rotate in a flat orbit — they dive in and dive out the galactic plane. Arms cause time disturbances above and below the plane, because arms are not flat — they are 3-dimentional curved tubes. Once a star dives out the galactic plane, it is pulled back to the plane by other stars collective gravitational pull. Thus, stars in spiral galaxies travel more like school of dolphins (rather than fish schools) — diving in and out for a breath.
