| manuchandel | Date: Monday, 17-March-2025, 6:51 AM | Message # 1 |
-- dragon lord--
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| Something Mysterious Swept Over Our Entire Solar System, Scientists Say
If you looked at the sky, it would have looked like a dense fog.
A giant wave of undulating gas and dust appears, per new research, to have engulfed our Solar System millions of years ago.
As New Scientist reports, astrophysicists have discovered that the Radcliffe wave — a 9,000 light-year-long structure full of stars and the gas and dust needed to form new ones — seems to have swept over our entire Solar System around 14 million years ago.
Previous research into this fantastic galactic wave suggested that Earth passed through it some 13 million years ago, plunging our planet into "a festival of supernovae going off," as Harvard astrophysicist Catherine Zucker told the Washington Post last year.
Now, University of Vienna doctoral student Efrem Maconi thinks that our whole Solar System may have passed through this incredible structure.
Using data from the European Space Agency's Gaia telescope, Maconi and his team identified recently-formed stars and the gases surrounding them within the Radcliffe wave to see how the structure itself appears to be moving.
Comparing that data to estimates about our Solar System's trajectory, the Vienna researchers found that the Sun and the Radcliffe wave were near each other between 12 and 15 million years ago. Ultimately, the scientists estimated that we moved through the wave roughly 14 million years ago. On a geological and even evolutionary scale, that's incredibly recent; the dinosaurs are believed to have gone exstinct around 66 million years ago.
Full article / read more / source - https://futurism.com/mysterious-wave-solar-system
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