Can anyone tell me what orientation our solar system has with respect to the galaxy?

I really appreciate the fact that so many learned folk here can answer questions like this for us interested bystanders... many, many thanks.

Now any of the following could be wrong... I am not certain of any of it.

As I understand it our galaxy is really thin like a dvd disk with a squash ball in the middle. I think the thickness is something like 10k light years as compared to a diameter of 100k ly. Happy to be corrected on this...

So if our system is two thirds of the way out to the edge sitting in one of the spiral arms what orientation does our ecliptic have? Parallel to the dvd? Right angles? In between?

And in that 10k thickness are we middle top or bottom? How is our spin oriented... I would guess that it is the same or similar as the galaxies.... but I am often wrong.

And while I have you here... Does anyone know how many systems are within say 100lys of us? 10lys?

I did try to search for this but found the old old problem... can either get nothing or the entire library of congress.... neither much help for simple questions... Perhaps its just my crappy search skills.. It is probably worth reading something on searching... must do that one day.

I have an ulterior motive for asking... I have been thinking about our radio leakage and the chance of detection by ET (if she exists). But it is also something I have wanted to know for years anyway... I always said that my kids should know here they live... they know a fair bit, but I never thought of orientation before a couple of years ago...

Maybe 3 dvd's stacked on top of eachother. Or four.

The easiest way to describe this is think about a clear night sky. You look up- and see this band that almost looks like a cloud across the sky... The Milky Way.
Of course, the view from Earth changes a bit.

As far as E.T. detecting our leakage- Highly Unlikely. Bear in mind that as the signal travels it also degrades and loses strength. It would take some very fine tuning and looking in narrow bands all across the sky to detect leakage.
It would like listening for a whisper coming from some unknown person standing far away in a crowded ball room.

That's one thing that I can never remember myself. I can only picture a Star Trek Federation map.
But; I did a quick search and found a couple of interesting relative links.
http://www.atlasoftheuniverse.com/
http://entropulse.com/planetpath.htm

The first link has a good way of viewing that.

I see what you mean. I tried all sorts of combinations of words. Usually; a search result helps me pick better words to search, but no matter what I did, I kept getting 2012 nonsense.

Now you've piqued my curiosity. You don't leave me with a warm feeling about this, but I will reserve judgement until I know what you're getting at.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

You know... I just now noticed this bit...

Why did you say she?

Full text


Image

same reason men call their cars old girl?

There is a Celestial coordinate system for observations from Earth.
There is an Ecliptic-equatorial (Celestial) system for describing the motion of bodies within the Solar System.
And then there is the Galactic coordinate system for describing our Galaxy or beyond. The Galactic equator is inclined 63 degrees to the Celestial equator.

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(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily available to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)

"Quaerendo inventis"

I don't call my aliens Old Girl...

Really? That's a lot. How did that happen, do you suppose?

That sounds like it depends on some assumptions about the galactic magnetic field. How confident are they of the properties of this field, and even if it is not a local field?
Looks like it's sucking on a lemon behind a goalie mask.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

Random chance would be my guess.

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(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily available to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)

"Quaerendo inventis"

I read this prior to viewing the image...

This link will convert from one system to another.

__________________
(By the way, I hate it that so many papers in the areas of planetary science and geology are not easily available to the dreaded "non-subscribers". It is like they are screaming at me: "YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH". Good, I feel better now.)

"Quaerendo inventis"

About the leakage of signals, I've read somewhere in the Internet that undirected signals from our TV transmitters will be totally ruined in background noise slightly beyond the orbit of Pluto and that to send a message to aliens you must send the signal directionally - because to make an undirected signal recognisable even at Alpha Centauri you'll have to channel the entire power of our Sun to do that - so bad (or good if you take your assumptions about aliens from Holywood movies) news, the aliens aren't watching our old TV and radio shows

Nothing happened. There is no connection between the plane of the
Galaxy and the plane of the Solar System. They are completely
independent things. The plane of the Solar System could have
been at any angle relative to the plane of the Galaxy.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

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http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

That sounds right if you want the signal to carry a radio or TV
program. If you just want to send slow morse code, much less
power is required.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

__________________
http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

Ok, but OT was asking about that if aliens should easavedrop on our transmissions, and Morse code is usually sent at wavelengths that will bounce off the ionosphere I think, so they answer is no.

And I think that the power requirements will be still enormous for an undirected signal, even slow morse code, at entire solar output orders of magnitude it makes no difference.

If the ET have several mother ships orbiting Earth in a circular orbit with a radius of one million kilometers = 3.3 light seconds; a good antenna can likely pick up signals on most of the radio and TV channels, but they fade in and out as the Earth turns, and Earth's ionized layers change, so interferance from stations on the same channel is annoying. Not much changes farther away, except the signals get weaker as the square of the distance, until all are gone at about Pluto distance, unless the ET mother ship has the equivalent of a major radio telescope. They would not reach nearly that far except the ionized layers rarely, and briefly, focus the signal into a narrow beam. Signals do penetrate these layers briefly and rarely on nearly all frequencies. A rule of thumb is you need 8 times the power for narrow band voice transmission compared to morse code. Exceptions abound and TV is much more demanding of transmitter power.
Et may rarely and very briefly hear the sound of an Earth radar transmitter a light year away, but probably cannot determine the source, unless received simultaneously by two radio telescopes spaced millions of kilometers apart. Neil

I didn't disagree with anything you said. Even sending slow morse
code, the energy requirement is far greater than that of a high-power
TV transmitter, but far less than that of the Sun. The wavelengths
used are irrelevant. You were talking about modulating the Sun, I
was suggesting you could modulate a far dimmer star if you don't
mind sending the signal at a very low rate. You can even still send
a TV signal, it will just display awfully slowly at the other end.

-- Jeff, in Minneapolis

__________________
http://www.FreeMars.org/jeff/

"I find astronomy very interesting, but I wouldn't if I thought we
were just going to sit here and look." -- "Van Rijn"

"The other planets? Well, they just happen to be there, but the
point of rockets is to explore them!" -- Kai Yeves

I don't know that! Auuuuuuuugh!





(What..[pause]... is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow?)

What do you mean? An African or European swallow?

Thanks folks for all the answers. It will take me a while to digest it all... its fantastic that so many people with similar interests can meet in one place as it were...

Um, er, I haven't checked out the references given here yet... so I may be about to embarrass myself... but...

I measured a dvd and its about 1.2 mm thick. Three come to about 3.6mm. The diameter is 130mm So if galaxy is 10k thin to 100+k diam then the single disk looks about right to me. Amazingly thin compared to what I had always kind of imagined. The central bulge is said to be around 25k diam so without a squash ball to hand I am not real sure of that part of it.

Dont worry, I am not loony fringe... I hold a unpopular view about Active Seti but I have rational reasons and would love to be convinced otherwise. If you are really bored then there is a long, occasionally unfriendly thread here:
Astronomers: Please stop shouting out to the universe.

It was not my most shining hour... I should have been more concise, more patient, less strident, and less present. But there it is. In any case this question now, is an offshoot from that because it raised an old question within me... which way are we inclined... to the galaxy.

Just doing my bit for the reduction of male chauvinism. Ages ago I read somewhere that it will help break down stereotypes if we throw the feminine pronoun in occasionally where we would have normally gone neutral, or more often when we would have gone male. Not sure the originator of the idea was thinking of ET at the time though. Sorry the answer is so prosaic...

Um.. correct me if I am wrong... but wouldn't the galaxy in initially forming tend to have solar systems aligned spin wise (and therefore plane wise) in the same way that solar systems form planets with aligned spin? I know our galaxy is a biggee... so we have no doubt merged a few smaller ones, so that would be where the orientation change occurred I would think... am I wrong? Or just internal to the galaxy star to star jostling?

I'm going by what the B.A. said in one of his videos...<chuckle>

As said already, it's highly unlikely that any of our signals get very far or are strong enough to "pick up".

Frankly, I find it a worthy risk even if we do broadcast ourselves.

It really is. It's a bit of political correctness that I would advise against.

I had several WOMEN get after me for using "they" or "he/she" or "she."
In the English language and unstated gender is referred to as him or he.
It is not male chauvinism to do so- it is proper English and it actually makes a person look rather uhhh (Fill in the blank for yourself) to do that.
I'm not bothered by it but I would advise you not to try that just to appear "Girl friendly."
It can have the very opposite result of what you are trying to achieve. And women will not always call you on it either, they will assume whatever they want to think.

The rotation of an individual system will depend on the movement of the cloud from which it condensed, which will have been exposed to various random influences, such as buffeting by nearby supernovae. Very slight relative movements within a large cloud will drive the final rotation plane when the cloud collapses.

Since a picture is worth a thousand words, I offer this image of our solar system, prepared in Celestia. We're in the ecliptic plane, looking across the (blue) planetary orbits towards the galactic centre. Galactic north at the top, direction of galactic rotation towards the left. The solar system is moving leftwards with the general rotation, but also rising slightly towards to the top of the picture, and drifting a little towards the galactic centre (into the picture plane). The green grid marks off equatorial coordinates, and so indicates the orientation of the Earth: the Earth's north pole is pointing towards the top left of the picture.

Grant Hutchison

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I want to go back to the moon.
I don't care which rocket you use, whichever one you pick, I'll like it, I swear.
"If you think the LHC will create black holes, you might as well believe Hobbits are at the bottom of your garden."- Dr. Mike Inglis
Rovers forever! - ToSeek

Quoted estimates vary, as do explanations of them. Dust & gas, stars, 90% stars, combinations.

Better yet; looky
.

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"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" - George Santayana

Yes its beautiful isn't it. Nice one. Looks pretty dvd'ish to me...

Still, we cant place too much stock in this picture as its fairly old... 44 Million years.

Right, but not completely random. Obviously there would be more stars to the "left" and "right" as opposed to "up" and "down," so shock waves would come more often from certain directions. What effect that might have on star system orientation, one would have to analyze.

Wow, this is all news to me. It's quite... empowering to know this. The article said....

Opher and her team concluded that this asymmetry is best explained if the local galactic magnetic field, located just outside our solar system, is angled some 60 to 90 degrees to the plane of the Milky Way

It seems most everyone else is saying closer to 60 degrees. 90 degrees would be really weird!

(And why did they say, "Opher and her team"? )

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Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts.

Good work... many thanks. Yep its quite clear the orientation after looking at it while reading you post. Excellent.

I had an immediate mental image of the solar system as a set of helicopter blades... looks like we are accelerating hard in, up, and leftwards. Got it, thanks.

Thanks for the input, but nah.... I am a typical Aussie male... and so, far from politically correct.

I reckon it makes people think ... and so it does have the effect I want. If folk don't like it... it doesn't bother me... I wont deliberately offend folk unnecessarily, but I don't think that is the case here.