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Remember preening over all that stuff about how we earthlings were part of this magnificent galaxy called the Milky Way?

Brace yourself for a shock, bring out those handkerchiefs while wailing violins build to a crescendo around you: The earth is actually part of a formation called the Sagittarius Dwarf galaxy; an entity so small -- in the larger scheme of the cosmos -- that it got swallowed up by the Milky Way.

Media reports cite a major project headed by University of Massachusetts astronomers in the United States that prove the Milky Way is gobbling up a smaller, neighboring galaxy in what reports, tongue in cheek, refer to as ongoing galactic cannibalism.

The study, published in the Astrophysical Journal, demonstrates how the debris from the Sagittarius galaxy, which is 10,000 times smaller in total mass than the Milky Way, is getting consumed by the latter.

The Sagittarius galaxy had itself been discovered by a team of British astronomers in 1994; the latest study, relying heavily on infrared maps of the universe to strip away millions of foreground stars and home in on Sagittarius, demonstrates how the latter has been pulled into the Milky Way's area of cosmic influence.

'We sifted several thousand interesting stars from a catalog of half a billion,' co-author Michael Skrutskie, a University of Virginia and principal investigator for the 2MASS project. 'By tuning our maps of the sky to the 'right' kind of star, the Sagittarius system jumped into view.'

Astronomers have been puzzling over the fact that from our point of view, the Milky Way is seen at an angle. Had the sun been part of this galaxy, it would have been oriented to the Milky Way's own path, and the planets including Earth would have been oriented around the sun in the same way as the sun aligns with the Milky Way.

The fact that the Milky Way is at an odd angle in our sky first suggested, researchers say, that the Sun is influenced by some other system.

That system has now been identified.

Scientists now say that over a period of two billion years, the Sagittarius galaxy has been dying as an entity, with the Milky Way meticulously consuming its bulk.

'After slow, continuous gnawing by the Milky Way, Sagittarius has been whittled down to the point that it cannot hold itself together much longer,' team member study co-author Martin Weinberg of the University of Massachusetts is quoted as saying. 'We are seeing Sagittarius at the very end of its life as an intact system.'

So what does any of this have to do with us?

The simple answer, in two words, is: Global warming.

Scientists postulate that as the Sun and its attendant satellites, including Earth, get consumed by the Milky Way, the higher energy levels in this much larger galaxy will cause the Sun to burn hotter, and to emit higher energy.

This, scientists say, is one reason temperatures have been rising steadily in all plants in our solar system.

Things are going to get considerably hotter all round.

As the consumption of Sagittarius by the Milky Way continues, further changes are being spotted, and monitored, in our own planetary system: Dark spots appearing, and growing, on Pluto; auroras being reported on Saturn; the polar shifts in Uranus and Neptune; the doubling of the intensity of the magnetic field on Jupiter.

Change is constantly, continuously, happening on the Sun, and the planets, thanks to this forced galactic marriage of Sagittarius with the much larger Milky Way -- and scientists are, thanks to this discovery, only now beginning to quantify this change, and its implications for all of us.

Time, meanwhile, for us to get used to our status as adoptive children of the Milky Way, rather than its own natural scions.

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and if they are different

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Originally posted by chrisisall:
I found this on another site, and figured I'd bring it here for scholarly review (which it is already getting, thanks guys).

My first take, being a non-astrophysicist, was that it would explain the angle we see the Milky Way at from Earth, but that stuff about the Sun increasing its energy... because of proximity to other masses of stars increasing-? That sounds fishy to me. But I ain't no scientist.

Here's another, probably where the article at the top was taken (condensed) from:

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We’ve always assumed the Sun was born in the Milky Way, and has been here its whole life. Is it possible it was actually born in a different galaxy, and the Milky Way stole it?

Do we have (cue evil music)… an alien Sun?

No.

Oh, you want more info? Alrighty then, sit back. This’ll be fun.

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Originally posted by chrisisall:
This sucks. I WANTED to be from a different galaxy....

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Byte, they're not talking about the edge-on view thing.

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Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
It is a little like how the earth and moon are tilted relative to the plane of the sun itself (this is why we do not have eclipses on every pass), yet we still orbit the sun. The planet was coalesced HERE, in the solar system, in the Orion Arm of the galaxy.

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Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
I believe that you and I are trying to say the same thing.

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Originally posted by MAL4PREZ:
The Orion shock wave will eventually pass us by, we'll be in the less dense space for a while, then the next shock wave will get to us.

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Originally posted by chrisisall:

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Originally posted by MAL4PREZ:
The Orion shock wave will eventually pass us by, we'll be in the less dense space for a while, then the next shock wave will get to us.

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So, school will be cancelled next year?

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Stars in a galaxy that joins another will, given time and no further perturbations, eventually settle into the disk, so being in the disk is not in itself proof of origin. So I skipped right past that issue.

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Also, our solar system does not remain perfectly in the galactic plane.

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our presence in the Orion Arm is not an infinite thing. The arms of a galaxy are not "stationary" in the sense that my arms would be if I held them out and twirled. The arms are shock waves

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Originally posted by BYTEMITE:

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our presence in the Orion Arm is not an infinite thing. The arms of a galaxy are not "stationary" in the sense that my arms would be if I held them out and twirled. The arms are shock waves

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:o Actually did not know that one. But makes a lot of sense.

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Originally posted by Jongsstraw:
Beings on distant planets in far away galaxies are looking through their telescopes at our solar system ... and they must believe, because of the great distances, that WE are an ancient and advanced civilization. So sad that they're so wrong.

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Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
It had been thought for a while that shock waves from nearby supernova were the trigger for proto-star formation and collapse, and could still be true, but this would be a more regular source of triggering new star formation.

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Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
Hmm, so it's protostar formations which cause the shockwave - but since the forming protostars are still orbiting the galactic center the shockwave also follows that pattern, which allows the arms to form? (lag in the shockwave and the density creates the spaces between the arms)

This is my best understanding of what you said.

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Originally posted by BYTEMITE:
Hmm, so it's protostar formations which cause the shockwave - but since the forming protostars are still orbiting the galactic center the shockwave also follows that pattern, which allows the arms to form? (lag in the shockwave and the density creates the spaces between the arms)

This is my best understanding of what you said.

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