Fig 2 - uploaded by D. R. Gies
Content may be subject to copyright.
-Depiction of the spiral arm pattern of the Galaxy as viewed from above the plane. The plus sign marks the center of the Galaxy, while the main four arms plus the local (Orion) spur are indicated as gray shaded regions. The dotted line through the center of the Galaxy indicates the location of the central bar ( Bissantz et al. 2003). The Sun's path in the reference frame of the spiral arms is indicated with a solid line (for p ¼ 20 km s À1 kpc À1 ), and diamonds mark time intervals of 100 Myr back in time from the present (top diamond ). The thick solid line portions correspond to icehouse times, and the crosses indicate times of large mass extinctions.
Source publication
We present a calculation of the Sun's motion through the Milky Way Galaxy over the last 500 million years. The integration is based upon estimates of the Sun's current position and speed from measurements with Hipparcos and upon a realistic model for the Galactic gravitational potential. We estimate the times of the Sun's past spiral arm crossings...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... disk of the Galaxy from the solar circle outward appears to display a four-arm spiral structure, as seen in the emission of atomic hydrogen ( Blitz et al. 1983) and molecular CO ( Dame et al. 2001) and in the distribution of star-forming regions (Russeil 2003). We show in Figure 2 the appearance of the Galactic spiral arm patterns based on the model of Wainscoat et al. (1992) but with some revisions introduced by Cordes & Lazio (2003). 2 This representation is very similar to the pattern adopted by Russeil (2003). We have rescaled the pattern from a solar Galactocentric radius of 8.5 kpc to a value of 8.0 kpc for consistency with our model of Galactic potential from Dehnen & Binney (1998a). ...
Context 2
... the spiral pattern speed is not well established and may in fact be different in the inner and outer parts of the Galaxy (Shaviv 2003). Several recent studies (Amaral & Lepine 1997;Bissantz et al. 2003;Martos et al. 2004) advocate a spiral pattern speed of p ¼ 20 AE 5 km s À1 kpc À1 , and we show in Figure 2 the Sun's trajectory projected onto the plane for this value ( À p ¼ 6:3 km s À1 kpc À1 ). Diamonds along the Sun's track indicate its placement at intervals of 100 Myr. ...
Context 3
... & Vasisht (1998) argue that mass extinctions may also preferentially occur during spiral arm crossings. However, they proposed that a spiral pattern speed of p ¼ 19 km s À1 kpc À1 is required to find consistency between times of mass extinctions and spiral arm crossings, and if correct, then the relationship between ice ages and arm crossings would apparently be ruled out because p ¼ 19 km s À1 kpc À1 is too large for the interarm crossing time to match the intervals between IAEs (see Figs. 2 and 3). We show the times of the five major mass extinctions as crosses in Figures 1-3 (Raup & Sepkoski 1986;Benton 1995;Matsumoto & Kubotani 1996). ...
Similar publications
We further develop the model of molecular cloud fragmentation introduced in Field, Blackman and Keto (2007; FBK). We show that external pressure acting on fragments establishes a scale-dependent critical mass. Fragments with masses less than the critical value are confined largely by pressure, while those with masses greater than or equal to the cr...
We present high-sensitivity and absolutely calibrated images of diffuse radio polarization at a resolution of about 10 arcmin
covering the range 10° < l < 34° and |b| < 5° at 2.3 GHz from the S-band Polarization All Sky Survey and at 4.8 GHz from the Sino-German λ6 cm polarization survey
of the Galactic plane. Strong depolarization near the Galacti...
Context: Field stars are not always single stars, but can often be found in
bound double systems. Since binary frequencies in the birth places of stars,
young embedded clusters, are sometimes even higher than on average the question
arises of how binary stars form in young dense star clusters and how their
properties evolve to those observed in the...
We consider the long-term tidal heating of a star by the supermassive black
hole at the Galactic center, SgrA*. We show that gravitational interaction with
background stars leads to a linear growth of the tidal excitation energy with
the number of pericenter passages near SgrA*. The accumulated heat deposited by
excitation of modes within the star...
We begin by recalling the isothermal, collisionless, disc-halo. The disc
component is the Mestel disc. Subsequently we introduce spiral arms to such an
isothermal disc-halo system that are co-moving in the mean with an
axi-symmetric background. These correspond to a similar disturbance in the
halo, which is comprised of spiral structures on cones....
Citations
... Within cosmic-rays however sub-atomic particles like neutrons, Figure 3. A depiction of the Sun's motion relative to the spiral arm pattern modified after [12] and [13], oscillations are not to scale. Perseus and Scutum-Crux should show a higher gas and dust-density, Sagittarius-Carina and Norma-Cygnus a more inferior [14]. ...
The development of globally distributed Phanerozoic petroleum source rocks is concentrated on time intervals, which correlate convincingly with climatic driven glaciation epochs of Earth's history, repeated every 150 million years, and during sea level high stands and maxima of global magmatism with a period of 300 million years. The 150 million year periodicity appears to be related to the path of the solar system through the spiral arms of the Milky Way and the 300 million year periodicity to changes of the spiral system. The spiral arms are preferred birth places of new stars, of which the larger ones have only smaller lifespans. Their preliminary deaths ended with explosions and selectively with the development of so-called white dwarfs, neutron stars or black holes. The times of the explosions of intermediate (sun-like) stars can be determined by measuring the present brightness of the dwarfs. Not surprisingly the last two maxima of recordable near solar system star explosions took place during the presumably spiral arms driven glacial epochs in Eocene to present and Upper Jurassic times. Such near solar system star explosions may have been the source of intense neutrino showers, cosmic rays and star dust. This dust contained all kinds of chemical elements, including phosphorus and uranium. Such cosmic phosphorus may have supported, through fertilizing , the distribution of life on Earth additionally to local phosphorus resources via bloom of biota in lakes and oceans and the enhanced growth of plants on land across all climatic zones. Subsequently it maintained the development of petroleum source rocks of all organic matter types within black shales and coals. Via the distribution of remnants of exploding stars-mainly white dwarfs, but neutron stars and black holes have to be counted as well-a cosmic contribution can therefore casually linked to the deposition of petroleum source rocks on Earth, not only purely correlatively by their contempo-raneous appearances.
... The star clusters on the galactic plane revolve around the galactic center and contribute to the Galaxy's overall spin. One complete revolution is commonly termed a cosmic year (Innanen et al., 1978;Gies and Helsel, 2005;Bailer-Jones, 2009). The current position of the Sun is located near the perigalacticum, where the circumferential rotation is precisely 233.4 ± 1.5 km/s (Drimmel and Poggio, 2018), and the cosmic year is more strongly constrained to 220-230 Myr (Araujo et al., 2019;Gillman and Erenler, 2019;Reid et al., 2019). ...
... The Sun is currently north of the midplane, moving away from it at 7 ± 1 km/s, and moving toward the Galactic Center at 9 ± 1 km/s (Fuchs et al., 2009). The orbital parameters of the Solar System can thus be reconstructed using a numerical integration of the Sun's current position and velocity in threedimensional space, as well as the Milky Way's known gravitational potential (Gies and Helsel, 2005;Bailer-Jones, 2009;McMillan, 2016). The Sun's motion throughout a circular orbit can be described in the radial and vertical directions using a cylindrical coordinate system (R, φ, Z) for the Galaxy. ...
... The radial velocity of a celestial body refers to its motion velocity component, namely, the velocity vector's projection, in a direction of the observer's line of sight. The radial distance from the Solar System to the galactic center has changed and the periodicity is considered to have been ~180 Myr since the Phanerozoic (Gies and Helsel, 2005;Bailer-Jones, 2009;Gillman and Erenler, 2019) (Fig. 1C), which may be consistent with the average transit time of the Solar System through the galactic spiral arms (~188 Myr) Erenler, 2008, 2019;Gillman et al., 2018). Additionally, the perigalacticum and apogalacticum are alternately observed in the Solar System orbit at a half-period of ~90 Myr (Xu et al., 1983;Chen et al., 2015;Zhang et al., 2023). ...
... Ney, 1959;Dickinson, 1975;Friis-Christensen, 1997 , Svensmark, 1998;Harrison and Stephenson, 2006, Pierce and Adams, 2009Kazil et al., 2012CERN Kirkby, 2007Kirkby et al., 2011Dunne et al., 2016Gordon et al., 2017 . Svensmark and Friis-Chiristensen, 1997 Shaviv, 2002, 2003, Gies and Helsel, 2005 Svensmark, 2006Kataoka et al. 2013, 2014 SN star burst nebula Hess, 1912Joly, 1929Dixon, 1929;Thomas, 1936 SN SN Shklovsky, 1968 Shklovsky, 1968;Russell andTucker, 1971 Terry andTucker, 1968;Ruderman, 1974;Whitten et al., 1976;Clark et al., 19771980Alvarez et al. 1980 Vogel, 1983;Kitagawa and van der Plicht, 1998;Beck et al., 2001;Hogg et al., 2002;Hughen et al., 2006IntCal20 Reimer et al., 2020SN Damon et al. 1995 Damon , Nishiizumi et al., 1989;Lal, 1991 Melott, A. and Thomas, B., 2010, Lookup table to compute high energy ray induced atmospheric ionization and changes in atmospheric chemistry. J. Cosmol. ...
There should be a lot of supernova explosions near the Solar System since its formation. They have affected the Earth through strong electromagnetic waves, cosmic rays, and blasts. The ionization of the atmosphere by the strong cosmic rays varies the concentrations of ozone and oxides of nitrogen, probably resulting into climate changes. The strong cosmic rays may introduce the evolution and the extinctions of life on the earth. The cosmic rays also generate various radioactive elements through the collisions with the atoms in the atmosphere. Other radioactive elements such as 60Fe may be delivered directly from the supernovae. These elements likely preserved in geological samples of sediments and ice cores.
... In regard to the growth and evolution of the continental crust, which is the outermost layer of the solid Earth, previous studies have mostly emphasized that the energy from the Earth's internal processes is at work (Davies, 2008;Koppers et al., 2021;Li et al., 2018), which is mainly derived from physicochemical changes in Earth's materials, such as radioactive decay, latent heat, and gravitational energy that is released by the movement of high-density materials to the Earth's center of mass. However, a few people argue that it could be driven by energy originating from outside the Earth, such as space radiation (e.g., solar radiation and cosmic rays) (Gies and Helsel, 2005;Shaviv, 2003) and energy brought about by the change in the Earth's spatial position in the astronomical environment, which is similar to the tidal energy dissipation that the Moon brings to the Earth when it moves radially away from the Earth by 38.2 mm per year (Dickey et al., 1994;Hedman et al., 2013;Ray et al., 1996;Zaccagnino et al., 2020). An extraterrestrial driving mechanism is intriguing because periodicities, which can better explain the periodic evolution of the Earth system, are the fundamental feature of the operation of celestial bodies, while the periodicity origin of the Earth's internal processes remains ambiguous (Rampino et al., 2021a(Rampino et al., , 2021b. ...
... This cycle is also similar to a galactic year coincidently, which is defined as the time (estimated to be ~220 Myr) for the Sun to orbit the center of the Milky Way (Bland-Hawthorn and Gerhard, 2016;Hess, 2002). In a galactic year, as the position of the solar system in the galaxy changes, the cosmic ray and gravitational environment where the solar system is located will also change, which in turn may affect both surface and internal processes occurring on Earth (Boulila et al., 2018;Gies and Helsel, 2005;Shaviv, 2003;Shaviv et al., 2014). In detail, the increased cosmic ray flux that the Earth was exposed to could broaden global cloud cover and reduce temperature, thereby promoting the probability of ice ages. ...
... In addition, the coherence between the zircon series and cosmic ray series is above the 95% confidence level on a cycle scale of 141-121 Myr (Fig. 13c). As the cosmic ray flux varies, the climate and biodiversity on Earth will also change (Gies and Helsel, 2005;Shaviv, 2003). ...
The driving forcing behind the secular evolution of the Earth system is controversial. Zircon, a common mineral in the continental crust, is a testimony of the growth and evolution of the continental crust and a recorder of Earth system evolution because of the time scale of the UPb isotopic chronology system zircon contains. Here, we compiled the largest known database of 2,042,944 zircon UPb ages derived by sampling the global continental crust. Comprehensive time series analysis techniques enable the identification of periodicities in the zircon production history and the growth and evolution of the continental crust over Earth's history. After the evaluation and exclusion of hot spot data impacts, we systematically obtained long-term cyclicities of zircon production of ca. 800, 360, 220, 160, 69, 57, 44, 30, 20, and 17 Myr, which are objective and statistically robust. These cycles are consistent with periodicities derived from multiple geological processes, i.e., mantle plumes, plate tectonics, orogenic events, large magmatic events, climate change, biological extinctions, and even meteorite impacts. The periodicities of these geological phenomena, including zircon production, indicate the periodicity of Earth system evolution in the past 3 billion years. Furthermore, these terrestrial periodicities also correspond to cyclic astronomical perturbations, such as the precession of the galactic warp, the galactic year, and the movement period of the solar system in the Milky Way, within error. Therefore, we suggest that the growth and evolution of the continental crust, and even Earth system evolution, may originate from the periodic driving forcing of the Earth's astronomical environment.
... Indeed, events on Galactic scales may have an impact on Earth. Terrestrial ice ages have been linked to our passage through the Galaxy's spiral arms (Gies & Helsel 2005), and our vertical motion through the Galactic disk may have affected the cosmic-ray flux on Earth and have corresponding biological signatures (Medvedev & Melott 2007). The Sun's passage through a dense cloud could compress the heliosphere to 1 au or smaller (Yeghikyan & Fahr 2003; it has even been suggested that a recent such event could have occurred, and the corresponding compression could have ultimately had an effect on human evolution (Opher & Loeb 2022). ...
The widespread detection of ⁶⁰ Fe in geological and lunar archives provides compelling evidence for recent nearby supernova explosions within ∼100 pc at 3 and 7 Myr ago. The blasts from these explosions had a profound effect on the heliosphere. We perform new calculations to study the compression of the heliosphere due to a supernova blast. Assuming a steady but non-isotropic solar wind, we explore a range of properties appropriate for supernova distances inspired by recent ⁶⁰ Fe data, and for a 20 pc supernova proposed to account for mass extinctions at the end-Devonian period. We examine the locations of the termination shock decelerating the solar wind and the heliopause that marks the boundary between the solar wind and supernova material. Pressure balance scaling holds, consistent with studies of other astrospheres. Solar wind anisotropy does not have an appreciable effect on shock geometry. We find that supernova explosions at 50 pc (95 pc) lead to heliopause locations at 16 au (23 au) when the forward shock arrives. Thus, the outer solar system was directly exposed to the blast, but the inner planets—including Earth—were not. This finding reaffirms that the delivery of supernova material to Earth is not from the blast plasma itself, but likely is from supernova dust grains. After the arrival of the forward shock, the weakening supernova blast will lead to a gradual rebound of the heliosphere, taking ∼few × 100 kyr to expand beyond 100 au. Prospects for future work are discussed.
... Indeed, events on Galactic scales may have an impact on Earth. Terrestrial ice ages have been linked to our passage through the Galaxy's spiral arms (Gies & Helsel 2005), and our vertical motion through the Galactic disk may have affected the cosmic ray flux on Earth and have corresponding biological signatures (Medvedev & Melott 2007). The Sun's passage through a dense cloud could compress the heliosphere to 1 au or smaller (Yeghikyan & Fahr 2003; it has even been suggested that a recent such event could have occurred, and the corresponding compression could have ultimately had an effect on human evolution (Opher & Loeb 2022). ...
The widespread detection of 60Fe in geological and lunar archives provides compelling evidence for recent nearby supernova explosions within $\sim 100$ pc around 3 Myr and 7 Myr ago. The blasts from these explosions had a profound effect on the heliosphere. We perform new calculations to study the compression of the heliosphere due to a supernova blast. Assuming a steady but non-isotropic solar wind, we explore a range of properties appropriate for supernova distances inspired by recent 60Fe data, and for a 20 pc supernova proposed to account for mass extinctions at the end-Devonian period. We examine the locations of the termination shock decelerating the solar wind and the heliopause that marks the boundary between the solar wind and supernova material. Pressure balance scaling holds, consistent with studies of other astrospheres. Solar wind anisotropy does not have an appreciable effect on shock geometry. We find that supernova explosions at 50 pc (95 pc) lead to heliopause locations at 16 au (23 au) when the forward shock arrives. Thus, the outer solar system was directly exposed to the blast, but the inner planets -- including the Earth -- were not. This finding reaffirms that the delivery of supernova material to the Earth is not from the blast plasma itself, but likely is from supernova dust grains. After the arrival of the forward shock, the weakening supernova blast will lead to a gradual rebound of the heliosphere, taking $\sim100$s of kyr to expand beyond 100 au. Prospects for future work are discussed.
... On the other hand, the main period of about 30 Myr is close to the Solar System's~32 ± 3 Myr vertical oscillation about the midplane of the Galaxy (Rampino and Stothers, 1986). In the Galactic plane region, increased cosmic-ray flux might lead to significant climatic changes (Gies and Helsel, 2005;Svensmark, 2006;Shaviv et al., 2014), whereas encounters with concentrations of disk-dark matter might trigger comet showers from the Oort Cloud (Randal and Reece, 2014), as well as thermal and geophysical disturbances in the inner Earth (Abbas and Abbas, 1998;Rampino, 2015Rampino, , 2017. We note that a 26 to 37 Myr cycle has been reported in the ages of terrestrial impact craters, using various statistical techniques and sets of crater ages (Rampino and Caldeira, 2015;Rampino and Prokoph, 2020) potentially connecting the terrestrial and extraterrestrial cycles. ...
We performed spectral analyses on the ages of 89 well-dated major geological events of the last 260 Myr from the recent geologic literature. These events include times of marine and non-marine extinctions, major ocean-anoxic events, continental flood-basalt eruptions, sea-level fluctuations, global pulses of intraplate magmatism, and times of changes in seafloor-spreading rates and plate reorganizations. The aggregate of all 89 events shows ten clusters in the last 260 Myr, spaced at an average interval of ~ 26.9 Myr, and Fourier analysis of the data yields a spectral peak at 27.5 Myr at the ≥ 96% confidence level. A shorter period of ~ 8.9 Myr may also be significant in modulating the timing of geologic events. Our results suggest that global geologic events are generally correlated, and seem to come in pulses with an underlying ~ 27.5-Myr cycle. These cyclic pulses of tectonics and climate change may be the result of geophysical processes related to the dynamics of plate tectonics and mantle plumes, or might alternatively be paced by astronomical cycles associated with the Earth’s motions in the Solar System and the Galaxy.
... If the solar system experienced such long passages, we could expect that the Earth suffered enormous irradiation, including cosmic rays from supernovae, during this residence period since spiral arms are the cradles of massive baby stars. The fossil record of this crisis must be, in some cases, catastrophic climate change on Earth (Shaviv 2002;Gies & Helsel 2005). Historical events during which all liquid water on the surface of the Earth was frozen, the so-called snowball Earth (Kirschvink 1992;Hoffman et al. 1998), have occurred at least three times, i.e., 2.43, 0.717, and 0.650 Gyr ago (Hoffman 2019). ...
Recent knowledge of Galactic dynamics suggests that stars radially move on the disk when they encounter transient spiral arms that are naturally generated during the process of disk formation. We argue that the large movement of the solar system from the innermost disk over its lifetime is inferred from an elemental abundance pattern of the Sun to those of solar twins within the Galactic chemical evolutionary framework. The implied metal-rich environment at the Sun’s birthplace and its formation time are supported by measured silicon isotopic ratios in presolar silicon carbide grains. We perform numerical simulations of the dynamical evolution of disk stars in a Milky Way–like galaxy to identify the lifetime trajectory of the solar system. We find that a solar system born in the proximity of the Galactic bulge could travel to the current locus by the effect of radial migration induced by several major encounters with spiral arms. The frequent feature we identify is the repeated passages of stars inside the same spiral arm owing to the wobble of stars traveling in and out of the spiral arms. We predict that such episodes are evidenced in the Earth’s geological history as snowball Earth and that their occurrence times are within our predictions. In particular, the stellar motion that vertically oscillates during passages through spiral arms occasionally leads to a split into two discrete passage episodes with an interval of several tens of megayears, implying two relevant snowball Earth events that occurred in rapid succession (∼720 and 650 million years ago).
... On timescales of the order of a few 100 Myr, the GCR flux is likely to be moderated by an enhanced supernova (SN) rate, and/or collapses of the heliosphere owing to encounters with dense interstellar clouds, associated with the Sun passing through galactic spiral arms [55][56][57]. On still shorter timescales (tens of Myr), additional variations in the GCR flux may be expected owing to the oscillation of the Sun about the plane of the Galaxy (with a period of ~64 Myr and amplitude ~70 parsecs [57]), and possible short-term variations in the size of the heliosphere owing to fluctuations in the local interstellar medium density [11]. ...
... On timescales of the order of a few 100 Myr, the GCR flux is likely to be moderated by an enhanced supernova (SN) rate, and/or collapses of the heliosphere owing to encounters with dense interstellar clouds, associated with the Sun passing through galactic spiral arms [55][56][57]. On still shorter timescales (tens of Myr), additional variations in the GCR flux may be expected owing to the oscillation of the Sun about the plane of the Galaxy (with a period of ~64 Myr and amplitude ~70 parsecs [57]), and possible short-term variations in the size of the heliosphere owing to fluctuations in the local interstellar medium density [11]. Stochastic events, such as nearby (say, ≤50 parsecs) SN explosions, may be superimposed on these secular and quasi-periodic galactic influences. ...
The lunar surface has been exposed to the space environment for billions of years and during this time has accumulated records of a wide range of astrophysical phenomena. These include solar wind particles and the cosmogenic products of solar particle events which preserve a record of the past evolution of the Sun, and cosmogenic nuclides produced by high-energy galactic cosmic rays which potentially record the galactic environment of the Solar System through time. The lunar surface may also have accreted material from the local interstellar medium, including supernova ejecta and material from interstellar clouds encountered by the Solar System in the past. Owing to the Moon's relatively low level of geological activity, absence of an atmosphere, and, for much of its history, lack of a magnetic field, the lunar surface is ideally suited to collect these astronomical records. Moreover, the Moon exhibits geological processes able to bury and thus both preserve and 'time-stamp' these records, although gaining access to them is likely to require a significant scientific infrastructure on the lunar surface.
... On timescales of the order of a few 100 Myr, the GCR flux is likely to be moderated by an enhanced supernova (SN) rate, and/or collapses of the heliosphere owing to encounters with dense interstellar clouds, associated with the Sun passing through galactic spiral arms [55][56][57]. On still shorter timescales (tens of Myr), additional variations in the GCR flux may be expected owing to the oscillation of the Sun about the plane of the Galaxy (with a period of ~64 Myr and amplitude ~70 parsecs [57]), and possible short-term variations in the size of the heliosphere owing to fluctuations in the local interstellar medium density [11]. ...
... On timescales of the order of a few 100 Myr, the GCR flux is likely to be moderated by an enhanced supernova (SN) rate, and/or collapses of the heliosphere owing to encounters with dense interstellar clouds, associated with the Sun passing through galactic spiral arms [55][56][57]. On still shorter timescales (tens of Myr), additional variations in the GCR flux may be expected owing to the oscillation of the Sun about the plane of the Galaxy (with a period of ~64 Myr and amplitude ~70 parsecs [57]), and possible short-term variations in the size of the heliosphere owing to fluctuations in the local interstellar medium density [11]. Stochastic events, such as nearby (say, ≤50 parsecs) SN explosions, may be superimposed on these secular and quasi-periodic galactic influences. ...
The lunar surface has been exposed to the space environment for billions of years and during this time has accumulated records of a wide range of astrophysical phenomena. These include solar wind particles and the cosmogenic products of solar particle events which preserve a record of the past evolution of the Sun, and cosmogenic nuclides produced by high-energy galactic cosmic rays which potentially record the galactic environment of the Solar System through time. The lunar surface may also have accreted material from the local interstellar medium, including supernova ejecta and material from interstellar clouds encountered by the Solar System in the past. Owing to the Moon's relatively low level of geological activity, absence of an atmosphere, and, for much of its history, lack of a magnetic field, the lunar surface is ideally suited to collect these astronomical records. Moreover, the Moon exhibits geological processes able to bury and thus both preserve and ‘time-stamp' these records, although gaining access to them is likely to require a significant scientific infrastructure on the lunar surface.
This article is part of a discussion meeting issue ‘Astronomy from the Moon: the next decades'.
