Testing the link between terrestrial climate change and Galactic spiral arm transit

Abstract

We re-examine past suggestions of a close link between terrestrial climate change and the Sun's transit of spiral arms in its path through the Milky Way galaxy. These links produced concrete fits, deriving the unknown spiral pattern speed from terrestrial climate correlations. We test these fits against new data on spiral structure based on CO data that does not make simplifying assumptions about symmetry and circular rotation. If we compare the times of these transits to changes in the climate of Earth, not only do the claimed correlations disappear, but also we find that they cannot be resurrected for any reasonable pattern speed.

Accepted for publication in ApJ Letters. Moderate revisions with clarification, no change in conclusions

References in corpus (4)

• The Vertical Structure of the Outer Milky Way HI Disk
• 3D Distribution of Molecular Gas in the Barred Milky Way
• Errors in kinematic distances and our image of the Milky Way Galaxy
• Constraining Spiral Structure Parameters through Galactic Pencil-beam and Large-scale Radial Velocity Surveys

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