Expert: Courtney Seligman - 7/21/2010

Question
Courtney,
Is there any relationship between solar ecliptics in galaxies (particularly in the Milky Way) and the galactic plane?  Is there any pattern, such as similar to nearby stars, or is it random?  
Thanks,
Paul

Answer
(Sorry about the delay. I thought I already answered this question (yesterday?), and presume I had a temporary network failure when I "sent" the answer.)

There should be no relationship between the plane of any given solar system and any other solar system. It should be completely random. With recent observations of circumstellar disks in areas such as the Orion Nebula, it should be possible to do some statistics on this, to verify that statement; but I haven't heard whether anyone has done so, and would be surprised if they have, because people tend to study things they hope will have interesting answers, and the expectation that the answer should be "Nope, it's just random" would tend to reduce their interest in doing the work. (Btw, the angle between our plane and the galactic plane is 60-some degrees, which would seem to indicate that at least in our case, there is no relationship.)