Activity

Remarkable migration of the solar system from the innermost Galactic disk; a wander, a wobble, and a climate catastrophe on the Earth.

“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 prediction. 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 Myr, implying two relevant snowball Earth events that occurred in
rapid succession (∼7.2 and 6.5 hundred Myr ago).”

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.05962.pdf