That’s the argument I think. Per that Wikipedia link:
> Randall hypothesizes a plane of dark matter exists roughly on the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. As the Sun oscillates in its orbit around the center of the galaxy, it passes through the dark matter.
If you're not smack bang in the middle of the galactic plane, you're going to be accelerated towards it by gravity, so you'll tend to bob up and down, like a pendulum.
The oscillations are not "around" the plane, they are through the plane.
That is; the plane itself has a local gravitational attraction
which is orthogonal to the galaxy core gravitational attraction.
If a mass is above or below the plane, the "local" gravity will
pull towards the plane.
since nothing stops it at the mid line of the plane it passes through
to the opposite side; rinse and repeat.
This bouncing above and below center line of the disk
is more or less independent of our solar system completing galactic orbits.
Fair; the descriptions I've seen seem to focus on the galactic orbit more than the local neighbourhood as the cause of the oscillation; this makes more sense.
The up down oscillation is completely decoupled from the orbit itself, assuming the orbital potential is uniform. It's like the galaxy wasn't rotating at all. You put something above the disk, and it gets accelerated downwards, but doesn't stop at the disk, it keeps going, until it gets dragged back up. Think of it like a pendulum.
I haven't done the math but I would think it's possible due to interactions from other solar systems. Similar to how satellites oscillate around Lagrange points
> Randall hypothesizes a plane of dark matter exists roughly on the plane of the Milky Way galaxy. As the Sun oscillates in its orbit around the center of the galaxy, it passes through the dark matter.