That page also answered my other question, why is the Sag Dwarf galaxy stretched into a Q shape around the MW? The other animation on that page shows the dwarf galaxy as it rotates while orbiting the MW. The gravitic and inertia forces stretch and elongate the galaxy, swinging some parts wider than other parts, and creating the long streamer swirls that don’t follow in a neat circle. Cool!

I still think you might be begging the question with that comment about the Sun being on the other side of the MW 50 Mya.

The reason the Milky Way is not distorted is that it is far more massive than the Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. Think of a comet and the Sun: the comet’s orbit is highly dependent upon the Sun, but the Sun’s motion is hardly perturbed by a passing comet. The number of particles used for each of the two galaxies in the simulation is not indicative of the masses involved (i.e. 1 MW particle does not equal 1 Sgr particle).

Pardon me, but isn’t infrared the portion of the EM spectrum that is most efficiently filtered out by our atmosphere?(Thus the Spitzer telescope) Ergo, if we were to see in IR, we still wouldn’t see Saggy at all…

[quote]“If people had infrared-sensitive eyes, the entrails of Sagittarius would be a prominent fixture sweeping across our sky,” Majewski said.[/quote]
so far so good. but on the image on the bottom of the same page there is a [quote]2MASS view of the entire sky[/quote]… meaning: a full(!) sky mosaic in 2micron infrared… yet i don`t see _any_ of the structures depicted in the video…

something doesn`t add up in my head without further explanation…
could you provide some?

any quasi-simulations and depictions of collision events _both_ systems tend to be distorted… is in the video “our” galaxy deliberately left untouched in a more-or-less generic perfect spiral form?
i know, e.g. that we don`t know the layout of a pretty large part of the plane (beyond the hub)…

Technically, you are correct of course. But it is not really relevant to this discussion.

I prefer this sort of Milky Way drool

Accretion relicts in the solar neighbourhood: debris from omegaCen’s parent galaxy
Authors: Andres Meza, Julio F. Navarro, Mario G. Abadi, Matthias Steinmetz

Pieces of the puzzle: Ancient substructure in the Galactic disk
Authors: Amina Helmi, J.F.Navarro, B. Nordstrom, J. Holmberg, M.G. Abadi, M. Steinmetz

and similar articles, including the extensive discussion on the canis major dwarf and (possibly) associated Monoceros stream? Accreted dwarfs can be pulled into the disk in a couple of orbits and the kinematic signatures of their origins lost quite quickly.

I agree that it is more likely that an accerted star ends up in the thick disk, but it is clear that a couple of GYrs is all that is needed for a star to end up in the disk on a circular orbit. Once they are there, they are hard to see.

That’s not the point. The original website made a sweeping claim based on ridiculous arguments that they alledged proved that the Sun *was* from Sag. D. and BA’s long debunking post exposed that idiocy. When BA writes “The claim that the Sun came from a different galaxy is wrong, wrong, wrong” I am pretty confident that he refers to that specific, ridiculous claim.

Other than that all we can say is that the evidence we see is compelling for the sun to have originated in the Milky Way or to be absorbed a long time ago from another galaxy with similar iron content. Other studies might give more evidence for either possibility, maybe some already have, I don’t know.

What has this got to do with saggy? I doubt we’d have been able to do the math on this if we were a part of it, and not the Milky Way.

Orbits can be circularized indeed, but on what timescales? We are talking about the Sun born in another galaxy, this galaxy getting “eaten up” by the Milky Way, our orbit changing its plane to within the MW’s average thickness, and then even made “almost circular” to the point of obliterating all signs of the previous galaxy. What mechanism do we know that allows that in around 20 or 25 orbits? What has driven all those giant changes in the Solar momentum, and angular momentum?

How unlikely!!!

That would only be circular if he were assuming that the Sun orbited the center of the MW. As stated, the Sun’s path is already known to follow the galactic plane, so it can be stated with reasonable accuracy where the Sun was positioned 50 million years ago, which was nowhere near the Sag. dwarf galaxy’s path.

“AND, something I totally forgot to add in yesterday’s entry: the Sun is near that intersection point… now. But 50 million years ago (yesterday in terms of the Sun’s lifetime) the Sun was 90 degrees around the Milky Way from the stream!…So that’s another reason the Viewzone claim of the alien Sun is wrong. You can’t say, “Look at how close the stream is the Sun; we must be from that galaxy!” when 50 million years ago the Sun was tens of thousands of light years from the stream.”

Playing devil’s advocate, isn’t this reasoning kind of circular? (pun intended). You’re assuming that the Sun is part of the Milky Way (and not the dwarf), and was therefore in a different part of its galactic orbit 50 million years ago. You can make that assumption, but you can’t use it to prove that the Sun is part of the Milky Way and not the dwarf.

If the Sun came from a “different merger event” how did it manage to get its galactic orbit in the plane of the Milky Way?

As anybody familiar with astronautics surely knows, changes in the orbital plane are very expensive indeed

1) The intersection of the orbit with the Sun is interesting from the fact that DM is streaming along the stream and so there is an enhanced chance of detection.

2) Yes – the Sun does not come from Saggy, but that does not mean it was not made outside the MilkyWay and brought in on a different merger event.