On several occasions, I have said that there is nothing special about 2012. I was wrong. The Mayan calendar makers did know something that we didn't know. Until quite recently, that is.
The year 2012 is when our solar system officially becomes, at least in the minds of those ancient calendar makers, officially a part of the Milky Way galaxy.
You see, scientists have found an explanation for why the Milky Way appears at an angle in the night sky. If we were part of the Milky Way Galaxy, then the dense band of stars that we call the Milky Way ought to appear as a horizontal band of bright stars stretching from east to west, cutting the night sky neatly in half. We should be orbiting the galactic center in the flattened disk where the stars are most densely packed -- we should be oriented to the galaxy's ecliptic. We are not. Instead our star, the Sun, wobbles up and down across the ecliptic in a cycle that lasts roughly 26,000 years.
This is because we are part of the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, and not part of the Milky Way.
We can't see the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy, but with infrared photography, we can see that the Milky Way is stretching out the tiny dwarf and eating it.
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Source:
Scientists Now Know: We're Not From Here!
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