Did the Mayans know about the 13000 year cycle of the sun going through the center of the galaxy?

Answer 1

Our Galaxy is called the Milky Way. There is no such thing as a "13,000 year cycle of the Sun going through the center of the Milky Way" (or of any other galaxy, for that matter). The Sun - the entire Solar System, actually - revolves AROUND the center of the Milky Way, but this orbit is estimated to take about 250 million years. I consider it unlikely that the Mayas knew those details.

The above is an excellent answer, as far as it goes, but we can have a little more fun figuring out where this notion might have originally come from before it got twisted.

From Earth's vantage point, it's true that the Sun crosses the galactic equator in a cycle. However, it's not a 13,000 year cycle, it does this crossing twice each year, and this year one of those times happens to be in late December (the other is in late June)... near the time of the Winter Solstice, in fact.

It's also true that the time of the crossing drifts very slowly... the crossing points happen on the solstices just about every 13,000 years (an entire cycle takes about 26,000 years, and there are two crossing points, so Crossing Point A lines up with the Winter Solstice in Year X, and then in year X + 13,000, halfway through the cycle, Crossing Point B lines up with the Winter Solstice). It's certainly conceivable that someone might hear that and take away from it "the Sun goes through the center of the galaxy every 13,000 years". This isn't true, but it's a reasonable mistake for a layperson to make.

Now... is it plausible that the Mayans could have known this? The Mayans wouldn't have known what the galactic equator wasexactly, of course, but they would have known what the Milky Way looked like, and if you draw a line kinda sortathrough the center of the Milky Way as it appears from Earth, you get a fair approximation to the galactic equator. Even if you're not horribly accurate about it by modern standards, you still get a line in the sky, and the Sun goes through that line twice a year, and that crossing happens on the Solstices in cycles of just about 13,000 years. Never underestimate the precision of measurements made by what amounts to a priestly caste whose living, and in fact lives, depend on them knowing pretty exactly where the Sun is going to be on such-and-such a date (if you're claiming a direct line to the gods, and you tell the king that on his birthday the gods will cause the Sun will rise just over the temple as seen from his palace, and he gets up early to see it and watches it rise over the outhouse instead, you're not likely to be alive to tell him what it's going to do next year). I think it's reasonable that they could have come up with the 13,000 year figure.

However, this has gotten corrupted by doomsayers into "the Earth passes through the galactic plane periodically." The implication here is that the galactic plane is some sort of magical or at least dangerous place to be, for whatever kind of handwaving reasons the person making the claim feels like throwing out there.

It is true that as the Solar System orbits the galactic center, it does have to cross the galactic equatorial plane at least twice during that orbit, but it's not going to happen any time soon: the Solar System is several dozen light years "above" the galactic plane at the moment, and is actually getting further away from it rather than closer to it.