Galactic Geometry

Symmetries of all sorts fascinate me. I often contemplate small scale and large scale symmetries, from isospin symmetry of the nucleon, to the eight-fold way in particle physics, to snowflakes, to geometric transformations, to galactic geometry.

Being this is technically suppose to be an astronomy and astrophysics blog, I decided to post about one of the most obvious symmetries of modern cosmology, which lucky for us, occurs in our own galaxy, the Milky Way Galaxy as we know it.

"The plane of the Milky Way galaxy is tilted at almost exactly 60 degrees to the ecliptic of plane of our solar system. What is more, every year the Sun crosses the galaxy through the galactic center, and being alive in these times means this happens on midwinter's day." (Martineau, John, "A Little Book of Coincidence" 2002.)