Life waxes and wanes with bobbing of the Solar System

By Aussiegirl

A fascinating article about a possible reason for, to quote from the article, a mysterious dip in the Earth's biodiversity every 62 million years. I had no idea that the Solar System moves through the Milky Way at all, much less that it bobs up and down!

New Scientist Breaking News - Life waxes and wanes with bobbing of the Solar System

The solar system's up-and-down motion across our galaxy's disc periodically exposes it to higher doses of dangerous cosmic rays, new calculations suggest. The effect could explain a mysterious dip in the Earth's biodiversity every 62 million years.

The solar system moves through the Milky Way rather like a child on a merry-go-round. It completes a circuit of the galaxy once every 100 million years or so but as it goes it bobs up and down through the dense galactic disc.