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That video has some flaws which are covered in this helpful article from Phil Plait https://slate.com/technology/2013/03/vortex-motion-viral-video-showing-suns-

That video has some flaws which are covered in this helpful article from Phil Plait https://slate.com/technology/2013/03/vortex-motion-viral-video-showing-suns-motion-through-galaxy-is-wrong.html https://slate.com/technology/2013/03/vortex-motion-viral-vid...

jkubicek 7y ago
> It’s wrong. And not just superficially; it’s deeply wrong, based on a very wrong premise. If you read further down in Phil Plait’s article, the video is based on a conspiracy-theory-style paper written by a crazy guy.
- woah-theories 7y ago
  The paper may be written by a crazy guy, but it's not a conspiracy theory unless there's a threat of real harm and abject paranoia of danger. So the paper may be a crackpot hypothesis, but if it's there to present a bogus idea, but isn't designed to foment anxiety of a secret enemy, there's nothing related to conspiracies. Paranormal magical thinking may specify fictious alien races, some good and some bad, and present conflict among made up aliens, with some of them being evil villains, but then it's just supernatural musticism with a science fiction angle, and not conspiracy theories. Even if it pushed an idea that the movie They Live was based on fact, it wouldn't be a conspiracy theory until drawing the major focus on connections to real world events, and hijacking the readers focus to recruit believers of a fear oriented narrative. If that's not the case, it wouldn't be particularly correct to categorize the ramblings of some freak as conspiracy theories. So get your terminology straightened out.
dpcx 7y ago
Are there examples of better videos? I haven't seen any, and I'd really love to. I want to understand what our solar system actually looks like, and the video I linked is the closest thing I've seen (even if wrong).
- Twisol 7y ago
  The Sun and planets basically do form a disk. The fact that the solar system as a whole is also moving through the galaxy is not relevant to its shape, basically because any external forces (like the tidal force, a difference in force between radially separated points on orbiting object) are not strong enough to affect that shape. My understanding is that the solar system formed out of a volume of gas and dust. Over time, gravity caused that volume to collapse inward; this in turn led to a bulging in the plane perpendicular to the axis of rotation. This is the same reason that the Earth bulges at the equator. But since a volume of gas and dust is rather less dense than Earth, nothing opposes gravity condensing it further. So it gradually flattened into a thick disk. Wikipedia’s “Protoplanetary disk” page explains this process with far more fidelity than I ever could. My point is, there’s a good reason the solar system is a disk: it was formed that way to begin with.

jkubicek 7y ago

> It’s wrong. And not just superficially; it’s deeply wrong, based on a very wrong premise. If you read further down in Phil Plait’s article, the video is based on a conspiracy-theory-style paper written by a crazy guy.

woah-theories 7y ago
The paper may be written by a crazy guy, but it's not a conspiracy theory unless there's a threat of real harm and abject paranoia of danger. So the paper may be a crackpot hypothesis, but if it's there to present a bogus idea, but isn't designed to foment anxiety of a secret enemy, there's nothing related to conspiracies. Paranormal magical thinking may specify fictious alien races, some good and some bad, and present conflict among made up aliens, with some of them being evil villains, but then it's just supernatural musticism with a science fiction angle, and not conspiracy theories. Even if it pushed an idea that the movie They Live was based on fact, it wouldn't be a conspiracy theory until drawing the major focus on connections to real world events, and hijacking the readers focus to recruit believers of a fear oriented narrative. If that's not the case, it wouldn't be particularly correct to categorize the ramblings of some freak as conspiracy theories. So get your terminology straightened out.

dpcx 7y ago

Are there examples of better videos? I haven't seen any, and I'd really love to. I want to understand what our solar system actually looks like, and the video I linked is the closest thing I've seen (even if wrong).

Twisol 7y ago
The Sun and planets basically do form a disk. The fact that the solar system as a whole is also moving through the galaxy is not relevant to its shape, basically because any external forces (like the tidal force, a difference in force between radially separated points on orbiting object) are not strong enough to affect that shape. My understanding is that the solar system formed out of a volume of gas and dust. Over time, gravity caused that volume to collapse inward; this in turn led to a bulging in the plane perpendicular to the axis of rotation. This is the same reason that the Earth bulges at the equator. But since a volume of gas and dust is rather less dense than Earth, nothing opposes gravity condensing it further. So it gradually flattened into a thick disk. Wikipedia’s “Protoplanetary disk” page explains this process with far more fidelity than I ever could. My point is, there’s a good reason the solar system is a disk: it was formed that way to begin with.