This is a big day. We are not going to let go of the tilt, which has dogged us through the winter season. There was an announcement from the Expert teams at the Park and Weather Services (they each have one that periodically make joint announcements). They say the cherry trees at the Basin on the other side of the River are going to start peaking today and we can march in Spring. Pink!
There was a note in this morning’s Washington Post that the Barbie Truck from the movie will be in town to capitalize on the color.
A lady named Vigdis Hocken got us rolling this morning. She has a common perspective to many Norwegian opinion writers. Living way up there as they do, in our experience they tend to lean to one side or another as this definitive image below suggests. Her contention about all this Spring transition ritual is summed up this way: “When an object the size of the planet Mars crashed into the newly-formed planet Earth around 4.5 billion years ago, it knocked our planet over and left it tilted at an angle.”
Here is the hangover:
Earth’s axis is the imaginary red line. We appreciate the lean, and often turn around several times a day to avoid leg compression as the orbital and ecliptic planes around the sun adjust. Low-resolution image from Timeandate.com for identification directions in which we personally tilt. Note colors in this depiction, which in a bi-partisan manner feature both blue and red highlights.
On that matter the Science is settled. Dr. Rajendra Gupta is an adjunct professor of Physics at the University of Ottawa. Speaking from the capital of the renowned nation to our north, he recently announced performance of a newly-devised computer model incorporating Artificial Intelligence. With the press of a single key, it will produce an image similar to the one above.
It does not transform historical figures from one form or hue to another, but his team has at a stroke stretched the formation time of our Milky Galaxy by several billion years. You probably recall that a billion used to be considered a large number, each being a composite of a thousand million things.
Our Universe is now proven- well, estimated to be proven, to be 26,700,000 million, not the old suspicion that it was only 13.7 thousand million and may need to produce photo ID for purchase of anything interesting.
We presume that will have direct impact on our orbital mechanics and could require us to turn around half as much over the course of a single thousand million years. So, we are going to grapple with the “tilt” of the “axis” as we hurtle at something like 17,000 miles an hour through the vacuum of space. We are told by experts that the imaginary line our planet follows on our roughly circular course around the Sun is likewise twice as old if not twice as far as previously considered. Dr. Gupta reminds us that the Earth’s rotational axis is another imaginary line that runs through the North and South Poles that can be colored as anything we want.
The impact that got our planet tilted is not expected to repeat this Spring, although reports from the countryside indicate there were wildfires that could be related to the Giant Impact Hypothesis (GIH). That is the current theory on how our Moon was formed out of some other spherical object caroming off of something that would someday be Detroit to form that cool bright object in our sky. How it got rounded up there is still a mystery.
Since this Giant Impact, Earth has been orbiting the Sun at a slant. This slant is the axial tilt, also called obliquity. At the moment, Earth’s obliquity is about 23.4 degrees and decreasing. We say ‘at the moment’ because the obliquity changes over time, although very, very slowly. It might take a thousand million years to notice. But be alert for today. At noon, our axial tilt, or what Dr. Gupta and Ms Hocken term our “mean obliquity” was 23.43613° or 23°26’10.0″.
Dr. Gupta that could mean a change in obliquity today of about 0.00001°, or 0.04″, less than 30 days ago. That means the Arctic and Antarctic circles are 1.2 m (4 ft) closer to the poles, and the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn are equally closer to the equator than 30 days ago. So, nothing to be alarmed about. The cycle repeats about 41,000 years, so we will just ride this one out as we have the last few thousand times. Well, not us exactly. But you get the idea.
So, to sum up the collision of astrologic and partisan events this week. Above, we have tilt and bobble of planets and galaxies. Across our River, a Hollywood lawyer, testified to other lawyers- Washington ones- about loaning substantial sums of money to an amiable armed drug addict who was about to be interviewed by IRS investigators. Thankfully, the CIA intervened by summoning DOJ officials to Langley where they were told they could lean any direction they wished so long as it was the right way, by which they meant the approved direction.
Welcome to Spring!
Copyright 2024 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com