We just went through the plane of the galaxy, which is the thickest part, the densest part, and the maximum density of cosmic rays.
Interesting--I did not know that. What's the period of the oscillation?
“What’s the period of the oscillation?”
IIRC, 11,000 years
Hm..... I wasn’t even close.
The Apex of the Sun’s Way, or the solar apex, is the direction that the Sun travels through space in the Milky Way. The general direction of the Sun’s galactic motion is towards the star Vega near the constellation of Hercules, at an angle of roughly 60 sky degrees to the direction of the Galactic Center. The Sun’s orbit around the Galaxy is expected to be roughly elliptical with the addition of perturbations due to the galactic spiral arms and non-uniform mass distributions. In addition the Sun oscillates up and down relative to the galactic plane approximately 2.7 times per orbit. This is very similar to how a simple harmonic oscillator works with no drag force (dampening) term.
It takes the Solar System about 225–250 million years to complete one orbit (a galactic year),[30] and so it is thought to have completed about 20–25 orbits during its lifetime or 0.0008 orbit since the origin of humans. The orbital speed of the solar system is 220 km/s, i.e., 1 light-year in ca. 1400 years, and 1 AU in 8 days.[31]