Ice Age Epochs and the Sun's Path Through the Galaxy

Abstract

We present a calculation of the Sun's motion through the Milky Way Galaxy over the last 500 million years. The integration is based upon estimates of the Sun's current position and speed from measurements with Hipparcos and upon a realistic model for the Galactic gravitational potential. We estimate the times of the Sun's past spiral arm crossings for a range in assumed values of the spiral pattern angular speed. We find that for a difference between the mean solar and pattern speed of Omega_Sun - Omega_p = 11.9 +/- 0.7 km/s/kpc the Sun has traversed four spiral arms at times that appear to correspond well with long duration cold periods on Earth. This supports the idea that extended exposure to the higher cosmic ray flux associated with spiral arms can lead to increased cloud cover and long ice age epochs on Earth.Comment: 14 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in Ap