muzungu makes an excellent point
I had not considered that the ninth chevron was still a constellation symbol -- which he very rightly pointed out that it was. Therefore, it would seem highly unlikely that a ninth chevron would cause a timeshift. However, there is something I am wondering about:
Six of the chevrons are x1, x2, y1, y2, z1, z2 coordinates. By triangulation, this will give you a middle point; the coordinates of the dialled stargate. Personally, I have to wonder how the devil the gate actually works out the spacial coordinates from only 39 chevrons, which can
all be be used for x, y
or z. The fact that there's an extra symbol for going outside our galaxy makes perfect sense if you consider this, but I think that it would have been a lot more logical to simply say that the six chevrons were the unique address of a stargate, and have nothing to do with space and time; these could be worked out automatically by the stargate. The ninth symbol, then, could possibly be used for another galaxy than Thor's, and perhaps further away -- however, having a different eighth chevron for different galaxies makes a good deal of sense, except that there are a lot more than 39 galaxies floating about up there. I would probably have chosen to have at least another
two chevrons for an extra-galactic address, which gives you 39e2 (or is that 2e39?) possible galaxies, or 1521. I think. On the other hand, we don't know how big the stargate system is; it may not extend beyond more than 20 galaxies, in which case you would only need eight chevrons. Does anyone have any ideas on this?
And oh, hey, here's an idea -- maybe the ninth chevron wouldn't make the wormhole jump in time, but since they're spatial coordinates, there's nothing against the ninth and maybe tenth, eleventh and so on chevrons causing the gate jump through different parallel dimensions...just a hopeful thought