Essay by William Hamilton III
April 18, 2005

from AstroSciences Website

Introduction

First, we will have to ask ourselves, “what is time?” and how does one travel through time at a rate of speed slower or faster than the ticking of a clock. This is not a question that we are going to answer any time soon as some of the greatest minds in philosophy, physics, and psychology have grappled with it. We experience time as one of the fundamental things in our lives, but it is so basic to our experience that it is difficult to define it in physical terms.

One definition of time is the continuum of experience in which events pass from the future through the present to the past. But that does not tell us much. How about, the time as given by a clock; "do you know what time it is?"; "the time is 10 o’clock. That still doesn’t tell us what the clock is measuring. Let’s get more sophisticated. Time is the fourth coordinate that is required (along with three spatial dimensions) to specify a physical event. Now we are getting more specific, more mathematical, but it still doesn’t tell us what time is.

I will attempt to give an operating definition here, one that is useful in understanding time travel. Time is a measurement of motion. To measure time we need periodic and repetitious motion. The earth orbiting the sun is one periodic motion that repeats itself that we use to measure time. The rotation of the earth on its axis is another motion we use to measure time. Sometimes these motions depart from exact repetition even if just by a second. We can call any instrument used to measure time a clock. We are always searching for clocks of greater precision which means that during each cycle of the clock there is little deviation from period to period.

We have a periodic motion of the earth with its diurnal rotation on its axis. At the same time the earth advances in an elliptical orbit around the sun which makes a difference in time between a solar and a sidereal day. The whole solar system is then proceeding on a journey around the galaxy in what may be a sinusoidal orbit which has a period in a range of 220 to 250 million years. It would be useful to pinpoint our position in this galactic cycle as well as determine our path of travel and rate of travel in order to map out a timeline of critical events in the historical record against this great galactic year herein referred to as a Cosmic Year. If we can consider this Cosmic Year to be a grand cycle, and other periodic motions as minor cycles and certain intersection points as major cycles, we may be able to predict future events using a cyclic time map.
 

The Grand Cycle

The sun is one of hundreds of billion of stars in our galaxy, the Milky Way. The galaxy is composed of gaseous interstellar medium, neutral or ionized, sometimes concentrated into dense gas clouds made up of atoms molecules, and dust. All of the matter -- gas, dust, and stars -- rotate around a central axis perpendicular to the galactic plane. The centrifugal force caused by the rotation balances out the gravitational force, which draw all the matter toward the center.

The mass is located within the circle of the Sun’s orbit through the galaxy is about 100 billion times the mass of the Sun. Because the Sun is about average in mass, astronomers have concluded that the galaxy contains about 100 billion stars within its disk.

• All stars in the galaxy rotate around a galactic center but not with the same period

• Stars at the center have a shorter period than those farther out

• The Sun is located in the outer part of the galaxy

• The speed of the solar system due to the galactic rotation is about 220 km/s

• The disk of stars in the Milky Way is about 100,000 light years across

• The sun is located about 30,000 light years from the galactic center

Based on a distance of 30,000 light years and a speed of 220 km/s, the Sun’s orbit around the center of the Milky Way once every 225 million years. The period of time is called a cosmic year. The Sun has orbited the galaxy, more than 20 times during its 5 billion year lifetime. The motions of the period are studied by measuring the positions of lines in the galaxy spectra.

click images to enlarge

The orbit of the Sun around the Milky Way is influenced by the galaxy’s matter, which does not solely occupy the galactic center. Instead, it is distributed all over space. Some of the galaxy’s mass is inside the sun’s orbit and some of it is outside. The Sun’s orbital period is determined by the galaxy’s mass within the orbit of the Sun.

Newton’s explanation of the speed of stars in the Milky Way is as follows. He showed that stars closer to the galactic center, including the Sun, experience a gravitational pull equal to the pull created by the mass that is equal to that of all the stars closer to the galactic center. Hence, the mass of the galactic center is equal to the total mass of all the stars closer to the center.

He also showed that stars farther from the center have a combined gravitational force of zero. Those stars pull in all different and opposite directions, canceling out one another. Therefore, the stars closer to the center experience a gravitational pull towards the center and they move at greater speeds, since there is more force acting upon them. Conversely, more distant stars have less force acting upon them and in turn, they travel at lower speeds. In addition, stars beyond this distance have speeds that stop decreasing and eventually remain constant.

We will examine some of these figures given above again by making certain calculations based on the researches of Bob Alexander and others on periodic catastrophic events such as the great extinction events that have occurred in earth’s long history going back to 250 million years ago.
 

Radio astronomers measure sun’s orbit around Milky Way
by Paul Recer
Associated Press

CHICAGO -- Astronomers focusing on a star at the center of the Milky Way say they have measured precisely for the first time how long it takes the sun to circle its home galaxy: 226 million years. The last time the sun was at this exact spot of its galactic orbit, dinosaurs ruled the world.

Using a radio telescope system that measures celestial distances 500 times more accurately than the Hubble Space Telescope, astronomers plotted the motion of the Milky Way and found that the sun and its family of planets were orbiting the galaxy at about 135 miles per second.

That means it takes the solar system about 226 million years to orbit the Milky Way and puts the most precise value ever determined on one of the fundamental motions of the Earth and its sun, said James Moran of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass.

A report on the finding was presented Tuesday at a national meeting of the American Astronomical Society.

"Our new figure of 226 million miles is accurate to within 6 percent," Mark Reid, a Harvard-Smithsonian astronomer and leader of the team that made the measurements, said in a statement.

• The sun is one of about 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, one of billions of ordinary galaxies in the universe.

• The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, with curving arms of stars pinwheeling out from a center.

• The solar system is about halfway out on one of these arms and is about 26,000 light years from the center. A light year is about 6 trillion miles.

Reid and his team made the measurement using the Very Long Baseline Array, a system of 10 large radio-telescope antennae placed 5,000 miles across the United States, from the U.S. Virgin Islands to Hawaii.

Working together as a single unit, the antennae can measure motions in the distant universe with unprecedented accuracy.

The accuracy is such that the VLBA can look at a bit of sky that has an apparent size one ten- thousandth the diameter of a human hair held at arms length.

For their solar system measurement, the astronomers focused on Sagittarius A, a star discovered two decades ago to mark the Milky Way’s center. Over a 10-day period, they measured the apparent shift in position of the star against the background of stars far beyond.

The apparent motion of Sagittarius A is very, very small, just one-600,000th of what could be detected with the human eye, the astronomers said.

Reid said the measurement adds supports to the idea that the Milky Way’s center contains a supermassive black hole.

"This ... strengthens the idea that this object, much smaller than our own solar system, contains a black hole about 2.6 million times more massive than the sun," Reid said in a statement.

Moran said the new measurement of the solar system orbit adds new accuracy to a fundamental fact of the universe: Everything is moving constantly.

• The Earth rotates on its axis at about 1,100 miles an hour, a motion that creates day and night.

• The Earth orbits the sun at about 67,000 miles an hour, a motion that takes one year.

• The sun circles the Milky Way at a speed of about 486,000 miles per hour.

And every object in the universe is moving apart from the other objects as the universe expands at a constantly accelerating rate. This press release gives us some more accurate figures to work with.

Mass Extinctions Occur Every 62 Million Years

Let us now look at another press release from March 10, 2005:

With surprising and mysterious regularity, life on Earth has flourished and vanished in cycles of mass extinction every 62 million years, say two UC Berkeley scientists who discovered the pattern after a painstaking computer study of fossil records going back for more than 500 million years.

Their findings are certain to generate a renewed burst of speculation among scientists who study the history and evolution of life. Each period of abundant life and each mass extinction has itself covered at least a few million years -- and the trend of biodiversity has been rising steadily ever since the last mass extinction, when dinosaurs and millions of other life forms went extinct about 65 million years ago.

The Berkeley researchers are physicists, not biologists or geologists or paleontologists, but they have analyzed the most exhaustive compendium of fossil records that exists -- data that cover the first and last known appearances of no fewer than 36,380 separate marine genera, including millions of species that once thrived in the world’s seas, later virtually disappeared, and in many cases returned.

Richard Muller and his graduate student, Robert Rohde, are publishing a report on their exhaustive study in the journal Nature today, and in interviews this week, the two men said they have been working on the surprising evidence for about four years.

"We’ve tried everything we can think of to find an explanation for these weird cycles of biodiversity and extinction," Muller said, "and so far, we’ve failed."

But the cycles are so clear that the evidence "simply jumps out of the data," said James Kirchner, a professor of earth and planetary sciences on the Berkeley campus who was not involved in the research but who has written a commentary on the report that is also appearing in Nature today.

"Their discovery is exciting, it’s unexpected and it’s unexplained," Kirchner said. And it is certain, he added, to send other scientists in many disciplines seeking explanations for the strange cycles. "Everyone and his brother will be proposing an explanation -- and eventually, at least one or two will turn out to be right while all the others will be wrong."

Muller and Rohde conceded that they have puzzled through every conceivable phenomenon in nature in search of an explanation:

"We’ve had to think about solar system dynamics, about the causes of comet showers, about how the galaxy works, and how volcanoes work, but nothing explains what we’ve discovered," Muller said.

The evidence of strange extinction cycles that first drew Rohde’s attention emerged from an elaborate computer database he developed from the largest compendium of fossil data ever created. It was a 560-page list of marine organisms developed 14 years ago by the late J. John Sepkoski Jr., a famed paleobiologist at the University of Chicago who died at the age of 50 nearly five years ago.

Sepkoski himself had suggested that marine life appeared to have its ups and downs in cycles every 26 million years, but to Rohde and Muller, the longer cycle is strikingly more evident, although they have also seen the suggestion of even longer cycles that seem to recur every 140 million years.

Sepkoski’s fossil record of marine life extends back for 540 million years to the time of the great "Cambrian Explosion," when almost all the ancestral forms of multicellular life emerged, and Muller and Rohde built on it for their computer version.

Muller has long been known as an unconventional and imaginative physicist on the Berkeley campus and at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. It was he, for example, who suggested more than 20 years ago that an undiscovered faraway dwarf star -- which he named "Nemesis" -- was orbiting the sun and might have steered a huge asteroid into the collision with Earth that drove the dinosaurs to extinction.

"I’ve given up on Nemesis," Muller said this week, "but then I thought there might be two stars somewhere out there, but I’ve given them both up now."

He and Rohde have considered many other possible causes for the 62- million-year cycles, they said.

Perhaps, they suggested, there’s an unknown "Planet X" somewhere far out beyond the solar system that’s disturbing the comets in the distant region called the Oort Cloud -- where they exist by the millions -- to the point that they shower the Earth and cause extinctions in regular cycles. Daniel Whitmire and John Matese of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette proposed that idea as a cause of major comet showers in 1985, but no one except UFO believers has ever discovered a sign of it.

Or perhaps there’s some kind of "natural timetable" deep inside the Earth that triggers cycles of massive volcanism, Rohde has thought. There’s even a bit of evidence: A huge slab of volcanic basalt known as the Deccan Traps in India has been dated to 65 million years ago -- just when the dinosaurs died, he noted. And the similar basaltic Siberian Traps were formed by volcanism about 250 million years ago, at the end of the Permian period, when the greatest of all mass extinctions drove more than 70 percent of all the world’s marine life to death, Rohde said.

The two scientists proposed more far-out ideas in their report in Nature, but only to indicate the possibilities they considered.

Muller’s favorite explanation, he said informally, is that the solar system passes through an exceptionally massive arm of our own spiral Milky Way galaxy every 62 million years, and that that increase in galactic gravity might set off a hugely destructive comet shower that would drive cycles of mass extinction on Earth.

Rohde, however, prefers periodic surges of volcanism on Earth as the least implausible explanation for the cycles, he said -- although it’s only a tentative one, he conceded.

Said Muller: "We’re getting frustrated and we need help. All I can say is that we’re confident the cycles exist, and I cannot come up with any possible explanation that won’t turn out to be fascinating. There’s something going on in the fossil record, and we just don’t know what it is." 1
 

Periodic Mass Extinctions, Alexander’s Thesis

Let us now look at Bob Alexander’s thesis and calculations which I will vary somewhat to determine the actual length of the Cosmic Year if his sinusoidal orbit is taken into consideration.

Periodic mass extinctions appear to have happened at least several times throughout the Earth’s history. In some cases most of the life forms which existed just prior to these extinctions were completely wiped out.

The K/T boundary, as it is called, marks the end of the reign of the dinosaurs and is on the order of 65 Million years old. It is popularly believed that a large asteroid struck the Earth causing a worldwide change in climate which interrupted the food chain.

No veggies means no veggie eating dinosaurs and then no dinosaur eating dinosaurs. The extinction of the dinosaurs allowed mammals to evolve and if they had not died out we probably wouldn’t be here to talk about it.

More recently discovered ’Smoking Gun’ evidence points to another mass extinction which occurred around 251 Million years ago when another large asteroid presumably struck the earth. And there appears to be even newer evidence that mass extinctions may happen at the rate of every 62 Million years (+/- 3MY).

By virtue of the chart above I believe the average is more like 63.796 MY, but for now let’s say that 62 MY (based on current physical evidence) is the periodic mass extinction average.

251 / 62 = 4.048 (Remember that number)

Since it is difficult to find a terrestrial based cause for these extinctions which would repeat on such regular intervals on such a long time scale, lets say that something happens every 62 Million (or so) years which puts us in harms way, so to speak.

Well, guess what ?

In it’s orbit around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, our Solar system may also do this little sinusoidal motion from the top to the bottom to the top (and so on) of the Orion arm (image right) which we go around in. Now, what if the period of one cycle through the arm is around 124 Million years ? Within one cycle we would pass through the middle of the ring (the most dense part) twice and about every 62 million years. Are you with me so far ?.

As we spin around in the arm our forward motion (~150,000 miles/sec) is continuous, but if we go up and down also, that rate would change with position due to angular motion. There is also the possibility that we move side to side within the arm, but for the sake of this discussion let’s ignore that for now.

Now, it’s bad enough that we would traverse this much more dense part of the ring, but we would go through its’ center at maximum velocity, much faster (in the up/down axis) than when we reach the outer edges of the arm where that relative motion (again up/down) stops altogether so that it can reverse. If we didn’t stop (in the up/down axis), we would just fly off into deep space and it would be bye-bye Milky Way. But luckily (or not) all of the mass nearer the center of the arm has gravitational force with acts to pull us back in for yet another cycle.

It may well be that these huge killer asteroids do not ’hit us’ as much as we run into them. Also, traveling at that much greater rate of speed means that we have a much better chance of hitting randomly moving objects because we are ’sweeping’ through a larger sectional area of space per unit of time.

The center of the ring isn’t a hard boundary, it is just more dense than on either side and there is a density gradient as you move away from the center. So, there is some latitude for interval timing due to this ’kill zone’ principal. Also, since not everything in the ring rotates at the same speed, conditions through the next pass may not be the same as the last one, so hitting something (or not) becomes a bit of a crap shoot. Maybe the Earth gets lucky occasionally and we shoot through the middle of the ring unscathed. This would explain gaps in the mass extinction record.

Ok then, remember the 4.048 number I told you to remember when we started ?

Well, 4.048 is very close to 4... as in 4 complete cycles or 8 centerline passes in 251M years. The error of margin then is about 375,000 years per centerline pass or 187,500 years on either side of it.

251M/62M= 4.048 intervals 4.048 - 4 = 0.048 (margin for error over 251MY) .048 / 8 = .006 (Margin for error per centerline pass) .006 x 62M = .375 MY (375,000 Y) per centerline pass or 187,500 Y off either side of the centerline.

By the way, if my ’napkin’ calculations are right, and the dinosaurs were wiped out by a big asteroid 65 MY ago we are due for the next one just about... yesterday... minus ~3 MY. In other words, either we are ~3 Million years over due or just got lucky on this pass.

Lets look at a few numbers. The Milky Way Galaxy is about 100,000 Light Years in diameter. Our Solar system is about 26,000 light years or about 2/3 of the way out from the galactic center and we revolve at 250 kilometers per second, or about 150 miles per second. We make one revolution every 226 MY which means that we have made about 20 revolutions since the Earth was formed about 4.5 BY ago. It is estimated that there are between 200 and 400 BILLION other stars in the Milky Way and that at least some of those have planets. It is likely from looking at our own Solar system that at least some of those planets probably have moons. That’s a lot of stuff - not to mention asteroids and comets.

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words, so below is a graphic below which illustrates my theory.

It is believed that we are about 20 Light Years away from the centerline of the Orion arm which is believed to be 3000 LY thick in our vicinity. That works out to being about .006 or .6% (20/3000) away from the centerline if the cycle was linear, but it isn’t. And we may not be out of the woods... or rocks, as it were, yet.

If the last mass extinction was 65 Million Years ago and the half cycle period is around 62 MY then the .006 figure is fairly predictable (not to mention scary) especially if we are moving away from the centerline.

One final note though before I go. If you think there is anything we could do to stop one of these killer asteroids if one were discovered tomorrow, you have been watching too many Hollywood movies. NO ONE has a plan on how to deal with this (there are plenty of ideas) especially our government which, more realistically, would probably spend our last days in typical fashion trying to decide who should pay for such a project...

Until asteroids or comets are near a luminous source (like our Sun) they are very dark. Most big telescopes are funded to do specific tasks, they don’t hunt for these civilization killers. And, since the number of serious amateur astronomers world wide who look for these objects is probably less than that of the staff at your local MacDonalds, it is likely that the only notice you will receive (if you are awake and looking in that direction) will be the thousand foot high wall of debris (which was formerly your neighborhood) coming at you at about mach three when one of them strikes the Earth. 2
 

Cosmic Year Calculations

Since the sine wave curve in Alexander’s orbit is an ellipse viewed edge-on (this is aside from the to view of the sun’s galactic orbit which is another ellipse), then in order to calculate the path length in one period of the sine wave, we need to calculate the length of the perimeter of an ellipse.

It seems in geometry that the ellipse is the "forgotten stepbrother" of the circle even though the ellipse is far more interesting. First some definitions.

An ellipse is the locus of points the sum of whose distances from two fixed points, called foci, is a constant.
Line AB is the Major Axis (also called Long Axis or Line of Apsides).
Lines AO and OB are the Semi-Major axes.
Line CD is the Minor Axis and is the perpendicular bisector of the Major Axis.
Points f1 and f2 are the foci of the ellipse.
Points A and B are called apses.
The eccentricity of an ellipse equals (f1 f2 / AB)

or (c/a)

or  (Line f1 B) - (Line A f1)

---

     (Line f1 B) + (Line A f1)

 

As the eccentricity value goes from 0 to 1, the ellipse goes from circular to highly elongated.

The Minor Axis to Major Axis Ratio, which we will call Y/X, equals

The perimeter of an ellipse approximately equals

The area of an ellipse equals

I have found a new estimate for the galactic radius of the sun’s orbit at 26,000 light years from galactic center. This makes the circumference of the orbit over 162,000 LY. Now, if this was a simple planar orbit such as our planet’s orbit in the plane of the ecliptic, the time it takes for one orbit would be over 229 million years and I have found various authoritative sources stating figures from 220 to 250+ million years.

In it’s orbit around the center of the Milky Way Galaxy, our Solar system may also do this little sinusoidal motion from the top to the bottom to the top (and so on) of the Orion arm which we go around in.

Now, it’s bad enough that we would traverse this much more dense part of the ring, but we would go through its’ center at maximum velocity, much faster (in the up/down axis) than when we reach the outer edges of the arm where that relative motion (again up/down) stops altogether so that it can reverse. If we didn’t stop (in the up/down axis), we would just fly off into deep space and it would be bye-bye Milky Way. But luckily (or not) all of the mass nearer the center of the arm has gravitational force with acts to pull us back in for yet another cycle.

It may well be that these huge killer asteroids do not ’hit us’ as much as we run into them. Also, traveling at that much greater rate of speed means that we have a much better chance of hitting randomly moving objects because we are ’sweeping’ through a larger sectional area of space per unit of time.

There are other possibilities for catastrophic and cataclysmic events due to solar motion when the solar path intersects what I would call dust and debris fields in space.

Milky Way Galaxy Bands of Dust and Gas? (Sun in Orion Arm)

We need top consider variations in solar output resulting in climate change, the rising probability of encounters with comets, asteroids, and dust, and the possibility of plagues resulting from bacteria and viruses embedded in dust, comets, and asteroids that could bring us diseases from space as hypothesized by the late Fred Hoyle in his book, with Chandra Wrickramasinghe, Diseases From Space. Another periodic event is the reversal of polarity in the terrestrial magnetic field. We also have speculative periodic events such as the Mayan calendar forecast for the winter solstice of 2012 which we will expand on as we revise this essay from time to time.

Now a complete sinuosoidal cycle would cross the galactic equator every 62 or 62.5 million years with a half period of 31 million years. This is data I obtained from a guy named Bob Alexander who has been looking into this, but he used slightly different figures that I used to calculate and admits that the minor axis of this elliptical wave may be less than the 3,000 LY years he initially calculated with a major axis.

I used a calculator to determine the length of the perimeter of an ellipse which involves a close approximation using the semi-major axis and semi-minor axis to determine the actual path length of the orbit using Bob’s figures and thus the time it takes for 1 circuit around the galaxy.

Within a margin of error I determined that the entire length of the sinusoidal path would be 180,941.0769 LY (slightly less if the semi-minor axis is shorter). This would result in a Cosmic Year period of 249, 698,580 years instead of 226 million years and if shortened slightly from errors in estimates to 248 million years we would have the following calculation:

248MY/62MY = 4

My Calculations where AO = semimajor axis and CO = semiminor axis AO = 20357.5 LY                       CO=1500 LY AO(sq) = 414427806.3               CO(sq)=225000 SUM = 414652806.3 X ½ = 207326403.1 SQ. RT = 14398.83339 X pi = 45235.26921 X 4 = 180,941.0769 LY (too much e) Period of Galactic Orbit = 249, 698,580 years Periodic Extinctions = 248/62 = 4

Here is an interesting translation of the Mayan Long Count from their cycles of 360 days converted to our cycles of 365.25 days in terms of years. Of significance here is the alautun which is approximately 63,081,429 solar years in length. If this represents the periodic extinction cycle which occurs 4 times in the Cosmic Year, then the Cosmic Year or Period of our Galactic Orbit may be 4 alautuns or 252, 325, 716 years which is 1.0105 x our calculated period above.

In other words, there are 4 critical points in the Cosmic Year that may result in mass extinction events. I am still investigating sub-cycles using the Platonic Year, but an interesting thing is that the solar ecliptic is tilted about 62 degrees from the galactic equator (87 degrees from the celestial equator) which means the orbital plane of our solar system is at an angle to the galactic plane that could determine the slope of our ellipse with a little more calculation which remains to be done.

I admit this is speculation for now, but it may be that we can improve our forecasts for the future by studying these cycles.

Bob said,

"It is believed that we are about 20 Light Years away from the centerline of the Orion arm which is believed to be 3000 LY thick in our vicinity. That works out to being about .006 or .6% (20/3000) away from the centerline if the cycle was linear, but it isn’t. And we may not be out of the woods... or rocks, as it were, yet."

Comparing the Mayan Time Cycles to Precession

At this point I will include my essay entitled SUN STORM in order to examine a growing story about the Mayan time cycles.

Astronomers are learning more about our mysterious star we call the Sun. The sun is a huge fusion reactor that slowly fuses hydrogen nuclei into helium nuclei.

Our sun is a medium-sized yellow star that is 93,026,724 miles from the Earth. This distance also determines a measure of 1 Astronomical Unit. This distance varies over a year.

The Sun’s core can reach 10 to 22.5 million °F. The surface temperature is approximately 9,900°F (5,500°C). The outer atmosphere of the Sun (which we can see during a solar eclipse) gets extremely hot again, up to 1.5 to 2 million degrees. At the center of big sunspots the temperature can be as low as 7300 °F (4300 K, 4000 °C). The temperature of the Sun is determined by measuring how much energy (both heat and light) it emits.

The sun has been determined to be about 4.5 billion years old. The earth and the sun are of the same age having formed at the same time according to existing theory.

The sun emits electromagnetic radiation and charged particles. Frequently, the sun will flare and brighten and an explosive flare will emit the energy equivalent of millions of 100-megaton Hydrogen bombs.

Stars like the sun are considered to be stable over their life cycles. The outward pressure of gases in the solar wind balances the inward force of gravity. Lucky for us.


Novas

From time to time a white dwarf star will accumulate too much hydrogen gas from a neighbor and this results in a tremendous explosion of this gas shell that brightens the star in the heavens. This is what we know as a nova. It usually occurs at the final stages of a star’s life cycle.

• Yet, do we know all that we need to know about novas?

• What happens if a cloud of hydrogen gas of unusually high density were to engulf our Sun.?

• Could a mini-nova result in the expulsion of a shell of gas that would burst like a firestorm through the solar system?

Although it seems unlikely, studies of ancient history seem to indicate variations in solar output that may have produced catastrophic changes on earth. Even today, a variation in solar luminosity is occurring and scientists report that the slight increase in solar output may be contributing to climate change and global warming. There is some evidence that some of the other planets in our system are also experiencing warmer temperatures and climate change. These changes could be the result of increasing accumulations of cosmic dust through which our solar system is passing.

My interest in the sun has recently been stimulated by reports I have received from a man, Dr. Dan B.C. Burisch, who claims he is a microbiologist who works for a shadowy arm of the government. He tells me that preparations are being made for a coming catastrophe in the year 2012 that involves changes in our sun and its effects on the earth. This is, of course, related to deciphering the Mayan symbols that seem to point to the winter solstice of our year 2012.

This is such an immense subject that my research on it continues in spurts. To summarize the predictions it can be said that a recurring event may cause the change in our sun. That event, known as the grand crossing, is synchronized to the precession of the equinoxes.

Here is a description of that event:

“Is there something significant we should know about the Winter Solstice date of December 21, 2012? Yes. On this day a rare astronomical and Mayan mythical event occurs. In astronomic terms, the Sun conjuncts the intersection of the Milky Way and the plane of the ecliptic. The Milky Way, as most of us know, extends in a general north-south direction in the night sky. The plane of the ecliptic is the track the Sun (click image right), Moon, planets and stars appear to travel in the sky, from east to west. It intersects the Milky Way at a 60 degree angle near the constellation Sagittarius.

The cosmic cross formed by the intersecting Milky Way and plane of the ecliptic was called the Sacred Tree by the Maya. The trunk of the tree, the Axis Mundi, is the Milky Way, and the main branch intersecting the tree is the plane of the ecliptic. Mythically, at sunrise on December 21, 2012, the Sun - our Father - rises to conjoin the center of the Sacred Tree, the World Tree, the Tree of Life.

The galactic center and the Great Rift contain great clouds of hydrogen gas and dust, the substances out of which stars are formed. These clouds partially block our view of the bright stars that crowd the galactic center.
The great rift of the Milky Way begins near Deneb and extends SW deep into the southern Milky Way ending near Alpha Centauri. The dust clouds of the rift are probably 1,000 light-years distant in Cygnus, and approach us in Aquila, Scutum, Sagittarius and Scorpius, where they are only a few hundred light years away.

The Eagle Aquila is dusted with dark nebulae, ancient star cities, stellar outbursts and the faint puffs of exploded stars. Aquila is on the celestial equator and cuts through the great rift of the Milky Way where it runs NE - SW. Aquila is poor in clusters, rich in faint planetary nebulae, and loaded with dark nebulae.

This rare astronomical event, foretold in the Mayan creation story of the Hero Twins, and calculated empirically by them, will happen for many of us in our lifetime. The Sun has not conjoined the Milky Way and the plane of the ecliptic since some 25,800 years ago, long before the Mayans arrived on the scene and long before their predecessors the Olmecs arrived. What does this mean? “

(from: http://www.crawford2000.co.uk/maya.htm)

Many do not think that anything special will happen, but others believe that the Mayans recorded significant events and used precise calendars to forecast the recurrence of periodic cycles marked by special events.

Why would the intersection of our sun and solar system with the Milky Way’s equatorial plane constitute a noteworthy event?

“The auspicious year of 2012 indicated in the long count calendar illuminates the fact that the Precessional movement of the Winter Solstice Sun will gradually bring its position into alignment with the very center of our Galaxy. For the Maya, this is like the last stroke of Midnight on New Year’s Eve; only in 2012 the New Year is the New Galactic Year of 26,000 solar years. The Galactic Clock will be at zero point and a New Precessional Cycle will begin.”

(from 2012 - The Astronomy Connection)

Maurice Cotterell has studied the Mayan (below image), Egyptian, and Incan lost sciences of the sun and has determined that the sun goes through cycles of magnetic reversals and changes of direction. He believes that the ancient calendars show how the earth was destroyed 5 times due to the sun’s twisting magnetic fields.

The last piece of the puzzle that may explain why the sun will react to this event comes from Dr. Paul LaViolette in his book, Earth Under Fire.

“In a nutshell, the book is about LaViolette’s dissertation subject, being [about] the effect of periodic galactic core explosions -- the period being roughly 26,000 years -- which send out shells of cosmic rays (chiefly in the form of electrons moving at near light-speed) that are hundreds to thousands of light-years thick (the thickness being the duration of that particular galactic core explosion).

The effect of this constant blast of cosmic rays -- once the shell hits our solar system which is 23,000 light-years from the galactic core -- is to push interstellar dust into the inner solar system (the dust is normally kept out by the pressure of the solar wind). The result of this dust is very major, in a number of different ways, including,

1) increased flaring of the sun in the style of T-Tauri stars

2) a downshift toward the infra-red in terms of the solar radiation reaching the Earth

3) a significant deviation from normal in terms of the total solar energy reaching the ground

The last shell passed the Earth roughly 14,000 years ago, marking the end of the last ice age, and causing all the major physical changes recorded from that time.”

(from: http://www.etheric.com/LaVioletteBooks/EUF-reviews.html)

Proto-stars which are starting to blow away the gas and dust surrounding them are called T-Tauri stars. The warm dust remaining around T-Tauri stars still radiates in the infrared. There is evidence that the remaining dust and gas surrounding T-Tauri stars form rotating disks which may mark the beginnings of planetary systems.

When we say that the sun may begin to behave like a T-Tauri star, this does not mean that the sun transforms into such a star. The gas and dust accumulation that could occur around the sun may cause it to behave like a T-Tauri star which could lead to a significant increase in infrared radiation.

This paper does not explore this theme in depth, but is meant to point the way to further research. While it is uncertain that minor changes in the sun will eventually lead to major consequences, and while it uncertain that interpretation of Mayan prophecy or prediction is correct, the fact is that evidence exists that earth has gone through periodic catastrophes and extinction events in its history and that major changes in climatic conditions have occurred and will reoccur in the future. Research may reveal to us how the sun has played a role in both catastrophic and extinction events of the past and how, by further solar studies, we may predict the sun’s wild weather.
 

Predictions

Since the last major mass extinction event took place during the era of the dinosaurs in the later Jurasic approximately 65 million years ago, the prediction is that we may be encountering a major cycle soon. Linda Howe on Earthfiles.com provided this graph to show the paleohistorical extinction cycles on earth.

Researchers studying rocks from Antarctica have found chemical evidence that a huge meteorite smashed the Earth 251 million years ago and caused the greatest extinction event in the planet’s history, killing about 90% of all life. The extinction, which scientists call the Permian-Triassic event, some 185 million years before a similar meteorite collision with planet earth killed of the dinosaurs. Asish R. Basu, a professor of Earth sciences at the University of Rochester (NY), said proof of a massive impact 251 million years ago in the chemistry found in rock fragments recovered on Graphite Peak in Antarctica.

The latitude in dating these events is such that it indicates that there is a threat zone that the earth passes through that may have a duration of a few million years before and after the crossing of the galactic plane by the solar system. However a minor cycle such as the precession of the equinoxes and the minor crossing where the celestial equator, the galactic center and the galactic plane cross may have a shorter threat zone in terms of years. If these two cycles conjoin at some point in the near future, it could signal a major cataclysm that would not only destroy a large percentage of life on earth, but probably extinguish unprotected civilization as we know it. One thing is for certain. Our orbiting satellites would not have much chance of survival.

To be continued…


References:

1. www.sfgate.com

2. http://www.lxrdesign.com/EXTINCT.htm