You must know it, since the time I avoid being redundant on the blog, and therefore except for those which require a follow-up, I hate coming back twice on the same subject. But as we race towards December 21, 2012, there may still be some worries on people's minds. The astronomers of the observatory of Haute Provence, at the time already, we indicated that there was no danger. At that time I still had doubts, but it seems that NASA confirms it below (even if you don't have to ignoring the existence of other dangers), moreover some, like Johnatan, indicate that the end of the Mayan calendar was actually October 28, 2011. But in the depths of my unconscious I cannot hide all the messages of these ancient civilizations that warn us about this particular date. Also, wishing to calm the spirits, I tried to translate this message from NASA to you. Then I'm like you, I'm waiting, but I'm also a Christian and I know our scriptures, so that what must happen, happens... or not... But let it be in calm and serenity...
Une of the most bizarre theories about 2012 has been created by paying very little attention to the facts. This idea holds that a cosmic alignment of the Sun, Earth, and the center of our galaxy -- or perhaps the galaxy's thick dust clouds -- at the winter solstice could have for some unknown reason led to destruction. Such alignments can happen, but they are a regular occurrence and they can cause no harm (and, indeed, it wouldn't be his closest alignment during the 2012 solstice.)
The details are as follows: Viewed away from city lights, a glowing path called the Milky Way can be seen curving across the starry sky. This path is formed from the light of millions of stars that we cannot see individually. It coincides with the mid plane of our galaxy, and that is why our galaxy is also called the milky way.
These thick dust clouds also populate the galaxy. And while infrared telescopes can see them clearly, our eyes detect these dark clouds only as irregular patches where they obscure or block out the faint glow of the Milky Way. The most prominent dark corridor runs from the constellation Cygnus to Sagittarius and is often called the Great Rift, and sometimes the Dark Rift.
Another impressive feature of our galaxy lies unseen in Sagittarius: the galactic center, about 28.000 light-years away, which hosts a black hole weighing four million times the mass of the Sun.
Claims for 2012 link these two pieces of astronomical fact with a third -- the position of the Sun near the galactic center on December 21, the winter solstice for the northern hemisphere -- to produce something that in no way seems astronomically reasonable at all.
As the Earth makes its way around the Sun, the Sun appears to move against the background stars, which is why the visible constellations change slowly with the seasons. On December 21, 2012, the Sun will pass about 6,6 degrees north of the galactic center -- a distance that to the eye will appear to be about 13 times the apparent size of the full moon -- and it was actually more close a few days earlier. There are different claims about why this portends ill to us, but they boil down to the coincidence of the solstice with the Sun entering the dark rift somehow presaging catastrophe or the mistaken notion that the Sun and Earth coinciding with the black hole at the galactic center allows for some sort of massive gravitational field on Earth.
The first attack on this theory is that the solstice itself does not correlate with any movement of the stars or anything in the universe beyond Earth. It just happens to be the day the Earth's North Pole is tilted farthest from the sun.
Second, the Earth is not within the range of the strong gravitational effects of the black hole at the center of the galaxy, since the gravitational effects diminish exponentially the further away from it one is. Earth is 93 million miles from the Sun and 165 quadrillion miles from the black hole in the Milky Way. The Sun and the Moon (a smaller mass, but much closer) are by far the most dominant gravitational forces on Earth. Over the course of a year, our distance from the Milky Way's black hole changes by about one part in 900 million – not quite enough to cause a real change in the pull of gravity. By the way, we are actually closest to the galactic center during the summer, not at the winter solstice.
Third, the Sun enters the part of the sky occupied by the dark rift every year at the same time, and its arrival there in December 2012 does not bode, precisely, anything.
Enjoy the solstice, certainly, and don't let the dark rift, alignments, solar flares, magnetic field reversals, potential impacts or alleged Mayan end-of-the-world predictions come into play...
Francis reddy
NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, green belt, DM
source: Nasa.gov
Translation Folamour, Free reproduction provided that the source and the translation are cited.
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