New paper says 'No evidence of planetary influence on solar activity'

Still no effect: Motion of Barycenter of the solar system relative to the Sun. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“Barycentric” influence of the planets on the sun is just statistically insignificant, and a previous paper that claims to find a signal in isotopic records is proven to be nothing more than a statistical artifact.

In 2012, Astronomy & Astrophysics published a statistical study of the isotopic records of solar activity, in which Abreu et al. claimed that there is evidence of planetary influence on solar activity. A&A is publishing a new analysis of these isotopic data by Cameron and Schüssler. It corrects technical errors in the statistical tests performed by Abreu et al.

They find no evidence of any planetary effect on solar activity.

In a new paper published in A&A, R. Cameron and M. Schüssler, however, identify subtle technical errors in the statistical tests performed by Abreu et al. Correcting these errors reduces the statistical significance by many orders of magnitude to values consistent with a pure chance coincidence. The quasi-periods in the isotope data therefore provide no evidence that there is any planetary effect on .

The paper (h/t to Dr. Leif Svalgaard)

No evidence for planetary influence on solar activity

R. H. Cameron and M. Schüssler

Max-Planck-Institut für Sonnensystemforschung, Max-Planck-Str. 2, 37191 Katlenburg-Lindau, Germany e-mail: [cameron;schuessler]@mps.mpg.de

Received 16 April 2013 / Accepted 24 July 2013

ABSTRACT

Context. Recently, Abreu et al. (2012, A&A. 548, A88) proposed a long-term modulation of solar activity through tidal eﬀects exerted by the planets. This claim is based upon a comparison of (pseudo-)periodicities derived from records of cosmogenic isotopes with those arising from planetary torques on an ellipsoidally deformed Sun.

Aims. We examined the statistical significance of the reported similarity of the periods.

Methods. The tests carried out by Abreu et al. were repeated with artificial records of solar activity in the form of white or red noise. The tests were corrected for errors in the noise definition as well as in the apodisation and filtering of the random series.

Results. The corrected tests provide probabilities for chance coincidence that are higher than those claimed by Abreu et al. by about 3 and 8 orders of magnitude for white and red noise, respectively. For an unbiased choice of the width of the frequency bins used for the test (a constant multiple of the frequency resolution) the probabilities increase by another two orders of magnitude to 7.5% for red noise and 22% for white noise.

Conclusions. The apparent agreement between the periodicities in records of cosmogenic isotopes as proxies for solar activity and planetary torques is statistically insignificant. There is no evidence for a planetary influence on solar activity.

Concluding remarks

The statistical test proposed by Abreu et al. (2012), a comparison of the coincidences of spectral peaks from time series of planetary torques and cosmogenic isotopes (taken as a proxy for solar activity in the past) with red and white noise, is logically unable to substantiate a causal relation between solar activity and planetary orbits. Furthermore, the execution of the test contains severe technical errors in the generation and in the treatment of the random series. Correction of these errors and removal of the bias introduced by the tayloring of the spectral windows a posteriori leads to probabilities for period coincidences by chance of 22% for red noise and 7.5% for white noise. The coincidences reported in Abreu et al. (2012) are therefore consistent with both white and red noise.

Owing to our lack of understanding of the solar dynamo mechanism, red or white noise are only one of many possible representations of its variability in the period range between 40 and 600 years in the absence of external eﬀects. This is why the test of A2012 is logically incapable of providing statistical evidence in favour of a planetary influence. Alternatively one could consider the probability that a planetary system selected randomly from the set of all possible solar systems would have periods matching those in the cosmogenic records. In the absence of a quantitative understanding of the statistical properties of the set of possible solar systems to draw from, the comparison could again, at best, rule out a particular model of the probability distribution of planetary systems. Here we have shown that the test in A2012 does not exclude that the peaks in the range from 40 to 600 years in the planetary forcing are drawn from a distribution of red or white noise.

We conclude that the data considered by A2012 do not pro- vide statistically significant evidence for an eﬀect of the planets on solar activity.

http://www.leif.org/EOS/aa21713-13-No-Planetary-Solar-Act.pdf

311 thoughts on “New paper says 'No evidence of planetary influence on solar activity'”

1. SCheesman says:

Quick typo: the opening should say “is proven to be nothing more…”

2. SCheesman says:
September 7, 2013 at 1:14 pm
Quick typo: the opening should say “is proven to be nothing more…”
Perhaps ‘is shown to be nothing more’ would be better. Proof and disproof are big words.

“Lots of evidence of solar influence on planetary climate”
There, fixed.
(That’s what really matters.)

September 7, 2013 at 1:24 pm
“Lots of evidence of solar influence on planetary climate”
Yeah, turn off the Sun and see what you get.

5. Wow….that was a less than intelligent remark, Leif. Why is your mind so closed? Supporters of wind, are supported by wind, same for solar. The climate scare is your only sales gimmick, and you are fighting to hold on to that. Give it up. It’s over…..go home.

6. 1957chev:
re your post at September 7, 2013 at 1:34 pm.
Leif is “home”.
He rightly complained at an anonymous troll trying to deflect the thread from its topic.
Your offensive and untrue bluster does not hide those facts.
Richard

7. Robert Wykoff says:

Ooooh, Anthony allowed barycenters on WUWT. Its been a while. The comment section will surely be fun.

8. kim says:

Oh, c’mon, Leif thinks it’s possible the Sun controls the Earth’s climate. He just doesn’t know how yet, nor whether either.
===============

9. PJF says:

“There is no evidence for a planetary influence on solar activity.
The Cameron and Schüssler paper is a specific takedown of the Abreu et al. paper, so all the proponents of alternative notions of planetary influence (here and elsewhere) should not lose heart. So long as you keep your ideas away from that science stuff, they’ll be safe.

10. GregL says:

I like seeing papers like this. As a professional statistician/meteorologist/money manager (this most recent profession of mine because I left the atmospheric sciences in disgust over its pseudo-religious takeover), I know all too well the temptation to find significant statistical associations that seem to confirm a hypothesis. The problem – when you have too many potential data series to explore, you will eventually find SOMETHING, especially if you want to find it. And it can fool you and others if you are not careful.
In general, statistical “proof” of a claim generally only holds up in one of the following two cases:
1) If the results are extreme, lead to a casual mechanism that can be separately investigated, AND that control/factor for the find-something-by-random-chance bias problem.
2) If they are the results of a rigorously controlled experiment that can be reproduced, follow a hypothesis, and in which aliased effects/causes can be ruled out (the discovery of the Higgs boson being a recent good example of this).
The statistical discovery by chance problem is all that much worse because of publication bias – namely that only “significant” findings are published, negative findings are not, and the development of conformity thinking within a field that can exacerbate the publication bias problem (a great example of this is the association of sodium intake with blood pressure within the medical sciences). So whenever papers come out that challenge a “statistical finding”, I am glad to see them. It helps to keep science honest and free from fooling itself.

11. Alan D McIntire says:

With Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Jupiter having the greatest effect on the sun in terms of tides,
there’d be scads of conjunctions, oppositions, and other orbital configurations to play with to get spurrious matches with past climate- “celestial dynamics climatology” likely is just like the current “climatology” models cherry pick wise

12. Max™ says:

This reminded me of one of my favorite quotes illustrating the difficulties of understanding the Sun:

Solar Magnetohydrodynamics is one of the most difficult fields in physics because it’s basically fluid mechanics, but the fluid is on fire, and made of magnets. ~Buugipopuu

13. “Statistics are like loose women, once you get them you can do anything you want with them.”
Walt Michaels

14. Luther Wu says:

kim says:
September 7, 2013 at 1:46 pm
Oh, c’mon, Leif thinks it’s possible the Sun controls the Earth’s climate. He just doesn’t know how yet, nor whether either.
===============
_________________________
I think you have it…
It seems to me, Leif spends a good deal of time correcting the errors made by those who claim that the sun influences our climate. Turning off the sun would definitely influence our climate, but how has it been shown that observed changes in solar output have changed our climate?

15. Max™ says:

Wait, I can’t tell if people are being ironic here or not… obviously the sun is the dominant influence on the climate, it is the energy source after all.
Turning it off would have some upsides… no more solar flares, yay! As a whole though I think we would miss it… probably, at least unless we manage to advance to a mature Kardashev Type 3+ civilization and no longer care about something as trivial as a single star.

16. Why would someone be looking for solar barycenter signals in isotopic records? The barycenter signal is seen in the long term climate changes as evidenced by long term cooling and heating of the Earth. Each time the barycenter transits the surface of the Sun, as opposed to moving perpendicular to the surface, solar activity declines and a cooling phase on Earth soon follows.

Leif Svalgaard says:
September 7, 2013 at 1:27 pm

September 7, 2013 at 1:24 pm
“Lots of evidence of solar influence on planetary climate”
Yeah, turn off the Sun and see what you get.

My comment WAS “on topic”, Leif–since, according to this paper, there “is no evidence of planetary influence on solar activity”, the only meaningfl point that isn’t null and void is the alternative position I stated.
Unless, of course, you have evidence to refute the claims of this paper, then by all means, let’s hear them.

September 7, 2013 at 3:18 pm
since, according to this paper, there “is no evidence of planetary influence on solar activity”, the only meaningful point that isn’t null and void is the alternative position I stated.
Your are still off-topic. The logic is also false: ‘No evidence of A on B’ does not imply ‘evidence of B on C’. Go away, please.

19. I think you guys are reading this story wrong. It is not about how the Sun affects the Earth, but how the gravitational effects of other planets (namely Jupiter) affects the solar activity.

20. Carsten Arnholm says:

Regarding the planets’ possible influence on solar activity, I came to a similar conclusion in 2009:
http::/arnholm.org/astro/sun/sc24/sim1/
The current paper appears to be saying there is no statistical evidence. I say there is also no known physical mechanism involving the planets, other than tides, that could influence the Sun, and the tides are miniscule in the extreme.

21. Carsten Arnholm says:
I say there is also no known physical mechanism involving the planets, other than tides, that could influence the Sun, and the tides are miniscule in the extreme.
The tidal theory would only affect surface behavior of the Sun. Oliver Manuel (omatumr.com) has shown physical evidence that the Sun has a solid core, rather than being a gas ball of hydrogen and helium. The solar barycenter would be acting on the solid core of the Sun and causing it to move within the surrounding gases and liquids. It is this movement of the core that is supposed to drive the magnetohydrodynamics of solar behavior.
It would not take much displacement of the solar core to cause fluids surrounding it to flow and modulate the Sun’s magnetic field strength.

22. Luther Wu says:

Max™ says:
September 7, 2013 at 3:00 pm
Wait, I can’t tell if people are being ironic here or not… obviously the sun is the dominant influence on the climate, it is the energy source after all.
_____________________________
This part of the discussion is way off topic, but No one is being ironic. Saying the sun is the primary energy source is meaningless to the discussion- it’s a given. No one is going to turn off the sun. However, the changes in the sun which we have observed have not been shown to cause any climate change.

23. neillusion says:

Isn’t this tantamount to a spoof article, I read a few sentences I could understand among many I could not, to get the admittedly intuitive impression that someone might be testing the real discernment of the readership of WUWT here.
Could intuition trump those genuine (or otherwise) efforts to land the other side of genius. Or am I simply out of my depth. (quite possible)

Back in 1980, the Presidency of Jimmy Carter was a joke, Ronald Reagan won the election.
Around 1991, the George H. W. Bush presidency was not well loved, between the Persian Gulf War, “No New Taxes”, “War on drugs”, etc.
About 2002, George W. Bush had his presidency defined by the 9/11 attacks and subsequent retaliation. Axis of Evil, No Child Left Behind, etc.
2013, we have Obama.
Also in 1980 we had a joke of a Democrat President with a no-policy energy policy, with surging extremist Muslims threatening Americans and world peace. 2013, the same. Except there is an alternation, Carter worked to prevent war, while Obama is hellbent to start one (that will strangely coincide with 9/11).
There it is. An ~11-year repeating cycle, obviously a sign of solar influence. Plus there are also indications of something three solar cycles long, possibly a harmonic, although the alternation shows that may be a half-cycle.
Now where’s my grant money?

25. Ian W says:

Luther Wu says:
September 7, 2013 at 3:37 pm
Max™ says:
September 7, 2013 at 3:00 pm
Wait, I can’t tell if people are being ironic here or not… obviously the sun is the dominant influence on the climate, it is the energy source after all.
_____________________________
This part of the discussion is way off topic, but No one is being ironic. Saying the sun is the primary energy source is meaningless to the discussion- it’s a given. No one is going to turn off the sun. However, the changes in the sun which we have observed have not been shown to cause any climate change.

There are those that would contend that a quiet sun has been shown to cause climate change. The noted astronomer William Herschel first put this forward. However, we are witnessing the Sun go quiet as it has done before, and when it did before the climate cooled – in Dalton and Maunder minima. So now we will be able to directly measure if there is any impact. The discussion is not way off topic – I presume someone has thought to follow Landscheidt and track what the barycenter path was in Dalton and Maunder and compare its motion then to its motion now? Or is your mind made up already? Just think a simple check and you could shoot down all those tin foil hat theories – or not 😉

26. F. Ross says:

The energy we receive today from the sun supposedly left the core of the sun some 150,000 years and 8.5 minutes or so ago [± a few millenia or so for margin of error].
If barycentrism has any validity, it seems to me that its purveyors should base their assertions on the positions of the planets at that point in time?
Just wondering.

27. Carsten Arnholm says:

David Thomson says:
September 7, 2013 at 3:36 pm
The solar barycenter would be acting on the solid core of the Sun and causing it to move within the surrounding gases and liquids. It is this movement of the core that is supposed to drive the magnetohydrodynamics of solar behavior.

The barycenter is not “solar”. The Barycenter is the center of mass of the solar system. It is not physical in any other way. It cannot “act” on the core of the Sun, being it solid or not. In fact the barycenter cannot act on anything, much like the barycenter of the Milky Way and the Andromeda galaxy cannot act on anything

28. Bill_W says:

After reading the article and all the comments, I am more convinced than ever that the 8-9 planets do orbit around the sun and that it does bombard them with energy. And I am fine with the idea that the effect of the other planets on the earth are much less than the effect of the sun.

29. commieBob says:

Sun 2 x 1030kg
Jupiter 2 x 1027kg
Given that Jupiter is 1/1000 the mass of the sun, how much effect does anyone seriously think it has on the sun? It’s trivially obvious that there will be some effect but why would anyone think it would even be measurable?

30. u.k.(us) says:

So, we proceed.
Understanding that which has been determined to be understood.
Does it get any better ?

31. Carsten Arnholm says:
September 7, 2013 at 4:53 pm
The barycenter is not “solar”. The Barycenter is the center of mass of the solar system. It is not physical in any other way. It cannot “act” on the core of the Sun, being it solid or not. In fact the barycenter cannot act on anything…
If the center of the solar system is not at the center of the Sun, then why would you not think the Sun would be gravitationally moved? The Sun has no choice, except to be pulled toward the center of the solar system’s gravity. The Sun orbits the center of the solar system the same as the planets do.
Look at the Earth – Moon system. The center of gravity of these two bodies is neither in the Earth nor the Moon, yet both orbit the barycenter. The Sun does the same thing.
The Sun is not in a simple binary system as are the Earth and Moon. The Sun’s orbit around the solar barycenter is wildly variable on the scale of hundreds of years. The variability is what shakes up the Sun’s core and modulates its magnetohydrodynamic systems.

32. commieBob says:
September 7, 2013 at 5:45 pm
Sun 2 x 1030kg Jupiter 2 x 1027kg
Given that Jupiter is 1/1000 the mass of the sun, how much effect does anyone seriously think it has on the sun? It’s trivially obvious that there will be some effect but why would anyone think it would even be measurable?
Interesting, the average solar irradiance varies only slightly during the 11 year solar cycle. Is it a coincidence?
The evidence does not show that the effect is measurable on a one year time scale, however, the effect does seem to be both measurable and significant in time scales of thousands of years.

33. Susan Fraser says:

Why is proposing that the solar sytem works as a ‘sytem’ with the planets infuencing the solar cycles, such a challenging idea?

34. Yet the sun is currently slowing down during this solar cycle as was expected.
A coincidence? No I don’t think so.

35. William Astley says:

Prolonged minima and the 179-yr cycle of the solar inertial motion, Rhodes W. Fairbridge and James H. Shirley, January 1987
We employ the JPL long ephemeris DE-102 to study the inertial motion of the Sun for the period A.D. 760–2100. Defining solar orbits with reference to the Sun’s successive close approaches to the solar system barycenter, occurring at mean intervals of 19.86 yr, we find simple relationships linking the inertial orientation of the solar orbit and the amplitude of the precessional rotation of the orbit with the occurrence of the principal prolonged solar activity minima of the current millenium (the Wolf, Spörer, and Maunder minima). The progression of the inertial orientation parameter is controlled by the 900-yr great inequality of the motion of Jupiter and Saturn, while the precessional rotation parameter is linked with the 179-yr cycle of the solar inertial motion previously identified by Jose (1965). A new prolonged minimum of solar activity may be imminent
Planetary temperature changes cyclically on the earth. An example of the cyclic climate change is the phenomena that is confusingly called the polar sea saw which is the label used for the fact when the Greenland Land ice sheet cyclically warms the Antarctic ice sheet cools and visa verse. Note it is only the two ice sheets that sea saw not the entire high latitude regions.
The solar sun connection requires a summary of the anomalous Dansgaard-Oeschger planetary observations which require an explanation how the solar magnetic cycle changes cause the observed planetary changes, The polar see saw occurs when then is a D-O cycle. The point is if the sun cyclically changes the earth climate then there needs to be a physical reason why the solar magnetic cycle is changing cyclically. i.e. The solar magnetic cycle changes are not random.
Changes to the solar magnetic cycle cause the cyclically planetary temperature changes on the earth.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2003/2003GL017115.shtml
Timing of abrupt climate change: A precise clock by Stefan Rahmstorf
Many paleoclimatic data reveal a approx. 1,500 year cyclicity of unknown origin. A crucial question is how stable and regular this cycle is. An analysis of the GISP2 ice core record from Greenland reveals that abrupt climate events appear to be paced by a 1,470-year cycle with a period that is probably stable to within a few percent; with 95% confidence the period is maintained to better than 12% over at least 23 cycles. This highly precise clock points to an origin outside the Earth system; oscillatory modes within the Earth system can be expected to be far more irregular in period.
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0612145v1
The Antarctic climate anomaly and galactic cosmic ray
Contradictory trends in temperature in Antarctica and the rest of the world, which are evident on timescales from millennia to decades, provide a strong clue to what drives climate change. The southern continent is distinguished by its isolation and by its unusual response to changes in cloud cover.
Borehole temperatures in the ice sheets spanning the past 6000 years show Antarctica repeatedly warming when Greenland cooled, and vice versa (Fig. 1) [13, 14]. North-south oscillations of greater amplitude associated with Dansgaard-Oeschger events are evident in oxygenisotope data from the Wurm-Wisconsin glaciation[15]. The phenomenon has been called the polar see-saw[15, 16], but that implies a north-south symmetry that is absent. Greenland is better coupled to global temperatures than Antarctica is, and the fulcrum of the temperature swings is near the Antarctic Circle. A more apt term for the effect is the Antarctic climate anomaly.
Attempts to account for it have included the hypothesis of a south-flowing warm ocean current crossing the Equator[17] with a built-in time lag supposedly intended to match paleoclimatic data. That there is no significant delay in the Antarctic climate anomaly is already apparent at the high-frequency end of Fig. (1). While mechanisms involving ocean currents might help to intensify or reverse the effects of climate changes, they are too slow to explain the almost instantaneous operation of the Antarctic climate anomaly.
Figure (2a) also shows that the polar warming effect of clouds is not symmetrical, being most pronounced beyond 75◦S. In the Arctic it does no more than offset the cooling effect, despite the fact that the Arctic is much cloudier than the Antarctic (Fig. (2b)). The main reason for the difference seems to be the exceptionally high albedo of Antarctica in the absence of clouds.
The following is a link to Bond’s paper “Persistent Solar influence on the North Atlantic Climate during the Holocene”
http://www.essc.psu.edu/essc_web/seminars/spring2006/Mar1/Bond%20et%20al%202001.pdf
Excerpt from the above linked paper:
“A solar influence on climate of the magnitude and consistency implied by our evidence could not have been confined to the North Atlantic. Indeed, previous studies have tied increases in the C14 in tree rings, and hence reduced solar irradiance, to Holocene glacial advances in Scandinavia, expansions of the Holocene Polar Atmosphere circulation in Greenland; and abrupt cooling in the Netherlands about 2700 years ago…Well dated, high resolution measurements of O18 in stalagmite from Oman document five periods of reduced rainfall centered at times of strong solar minima at 6300, 7400, 8300, 9000, and 9500 years ago….”
The mechanism as to how the orbital position of the planets cyclically affects the sun is not gravitational. To validate or invalidate how planetary orbital position cyclically affects the sun it is necessary to understand the mechanisms. The fundamental model that is assumed for what creates the solar magnetic field and field variance is not correct.
Leif have you noticed that the solar large scale magnetic field intensity has dropped by 50%? What is your explanation, random noise?
http://www.solen.info/solar/polarfields/polar.html
A Doubling of the Sun’s Coronal Magnetic Field during the Last 100 Years
http://www.wdc.rl.ac.uk/wdcc1/papers/nature.htm
Evolution of the Sun’s large-scale magnetic field since the Maunder minimum
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v408/n6811/abs/408445a0.html

36. RoHa says:

@ Michele
“Statistics are like loose women, once you get them you can do anything you want with them.”
Walt Michaels
But you often have to pay a price of one sort or another.

37. kim says:

Yes, the route and the effect of the wandering barycenter, I know, it can’t, we’ll say the wobbling of the sun around the barycenter, though tidally only millimeters(as in a butterfly wingflap), might modulate magnetodynamic effects, which might modify the earth’s atmos & biospheres, by some as yet unknown mechanism(s). Polished words, Leif examines and finds the worm, a ghost mechanism.
====================

38. Werner Brozek says:

commieBob says:
September 7, 2013 at 5:45 pm
Sun 2 x 1030kg
Jupiter 2 x 1027kg
Given that Jupiter is 1/1000 the mass of the sun, how much effect does anyone seriously think it has on the sun? It’s trivially obvious that there will be some effect but why would anyone think it would even be measurable?

If there were no planets around the sun, the sun would rotate around its centre, but even if Jupiter were the only planet, the centre of mass would be at the surface of the sun that both would revolve around. What affect this has is another matter.

39. Max™ says:

Look at the Earth – Moon system. The center of gravity of these two bodies is neither in the Earth nor the Moon, yet both orbit the barycenter. The Sun does the same thing. ~David Thompson

Uh, the Earth-Moon system orbits a point within the Earth, it is displaced from the center a bit, but it is definitely inside the planet.
Pluto-Charon orbit a point outside either body, and periodically the Sun-Jupiter system is orbiting a point above the surface of the Sun, with the other planets tagging along for the ride.
Now, there are magnetic field lines threaded through the insides of that big ball of fusing hydrogen and plasma, applying torque to magnetic field lines embedded in a ball of magnetic fluid is going to do something… I don’t think that something will be obvious, but I posted the quote about Solar Magnetohydrodynamics for a reason, fluid mechanics is pretty freakin’ complex, never mind when said fluid is made of magnets AND on fire.

40. george e. smith says:

“”””””……Leif Svalgaard says:
September 7, 2013 at 1:16 pm
SCheesman says:
September 7, 2013 at 1:14 pm
Quick typo: the opening should say “is proven to be nothing more…”
Perhaps ‘is shown to be nothing more’ would be better. Proof and disproof are big words…….””””””
How ’bout “maybe” ? “Is shown” is big words too, and further more it depends on what your definition of “is” is !

41. george e. smith says:

“”””””…….Max™ says:
September 7, 2013 at 7:20 pm
Look at the Earth – Moon system. The center of gravity of these two bodies is neither in the Earth nor the Moon, yet both orbit the barycenter. The Sun does the same thing. ~David Thompson
Uh, the Earth-Moon system orbits a point within the Earth, it is displaced from the center a bit, but it is definitely inside the planet……..””””””
So what does the track of the rest of the universe look like relative to the barycenter ?

42. David Ball says:

Max™ says:
September 7, 2013 at 7:20 pm
I understood what you meant. It is not unreasonable to think that magnetic field concentrations would produce some sort of effect. We know that the suns magnetic field affects the solar surface. I do respect Dr. Svalgaards perspective, but the jury is still out. Solar winds and magnetic field interactions not only with the atmosphere, but also the earth itself are outside of the scope of TSI.

43. Max™ says:

So what does the track of the rest of the universe look like relative to the barycenter ? ~george e. smith

This should clear that up for you: http://calgary.rasc.ca/barycenter.htm
Bonus awesomeness here: http://calgary.rasc.ca/howfast.htm
The howfast one will show you which direction relative to various objects we are traveling (the rotation of the planet carries us to the east, if the sun is above you, you’re moving roughly to the west, at midnight we’re moving roughly to your east, and the solar system is currently heading roughly towards vega as it orbits through the milky way, not sure which way the milky way is heading relative to the CMBR though) which is just fun to know for me at least.

44. David Thomson says:
September 7, 2013 at 3:36 pm
Oliver Manuel (omatumr.com) has shown physical evidence that the Sun has a solid core, rather than being a gas ball of hydrogen and helium.
Manuel is a crank and has shown no such thing. The tidal forces do not care what material the Sun is made of.
neillusion says:
September 7, 2013 at 4:10 pm
Isn’t this tantamount to a spoof article
No spoof, but [granted] just a bit difficult.
Ian W says:
September 7, 2013 at 4:38 pm
The noted astronomer William Herschel first put this forward.
http://www.leif.org/EOS/grl50846-Herschel.pdf
“measured correlations between sunspot number and wheat price and wheat yield data would be very likely realizations of random data; these correlations are “insigniﬁcant.” Therefore, Herschel’s hypothesis must be regarded with skepticism.”
I presume someone has thought to follow Landscheidt and track what the barycenter path was in Dalton and Maunder and compare its motion then to its motion now?
It doesn’t matter what it was or is. The barycenter has no influence on anything.
Dan Griswold says:
September 7, 2013 at 4:51 pm
Geoff Sharp has a new paper published. Has anyone looked at it?
Yes, it does not pass muster
David Thomson says:
September 7, 2013 at 5:55 pm
Look at the Earth – Moon system. The center of gravity of these two bodies is neither in the Earth nor the Moon, yet both orbit the barycenter. The Sun does the same thing.
The Sun is not in a simple binary system as are the Earth and Moon. The Sun’s orbit around the solar barycenter is wildly variable on the scale of hundreds of years. The variability is what shakes up the Sun’s core and modulates its magnetohydrodynamic systems.
William Astley says:
September 7, 2013 at 7:00 pm
The fundamental model that is assumed for what creates the solar magnetic field and field variance is not correct.
Well, contrary to what you claim, it is reasonably well understood.
Leif have you noticed that the solar large scale magnetic field intensity has dropped by 50%? What is your explanation, random noise?
It falls to zero every 11 years…
A Doubling of the Sun’s Coronal Magnetic Field during the Last 100 Years
Werner Brozek says:
September 7, 2013 at 7:17 pm
If there were no planets around the sun, the sun would rotate around its centre, but even if Jupiter were the only planet, the centre of mass would be at the surface of the sun that both would revolve around.
Orbital revolution and axial rotation are two different things and cannot be mixed: http://www.leif.org/EOS/Shirley-MNRAS.pdf

45. Max™ says:
September 7, 2013 at 7:20 pm
Uh, the Earth-Moon system orbits a point within the Earth, it is displaced from the center a bit, but it is definitely inside the planet.
Oops! My bad. Thanks for correcting me.

46. David Thomson says:
September 7, 2013 at 5:55 pm
Look at the Earth – Moon system. The center of gravity of these two bodies is neither in the Earth nor the Moon, yet both orbit the barycenter. The Sun does the same thing.
Great confusion here. The Earth+Moon orbits the center of the Sun as do all other planet+moon systems. You do not need to understand the theory [although it is simple enough]. We have very precise measurements of the Earth’s orbit and they show that the E+M orbit the center of the Sun. A simple consequence hereof is the measured value of TSI which varies with the square of the distance to the center.

47. Walter J Horsting says:
September 7, 2013 at 9:19 pm
Alexander, Hydrologist For South Africa, was planning four dams on the Nile for 500 year flood level. He found a flood gauge that was 1500 years old and tied sun cycles driven by planetary gravity influences in the attached link..
Figure 10 in the link illustrates the flaw in his logic. Here is the Figure http://www.leif.org/research/DavidA10.png it shows what TSI should be at various points of the Earth’s orbit. On this Figure http://www.leif.org/research/DavidA11.png those points are plotted [red points] versus what is actually observed [black curve].
There is so much confusion about what orbits what. The barycenter of the Earth and the Moon is somewhere within the Earth moving around just under the Moon. Now, think of the International Space Station. Does it orbit the center of the Earth or does it orbit the [moving] barycenter of the Earth and the Moon? After answering consider this: the ISS orbits at an altitude of 415 km above the surface of the Earth. Consider a [hardy] spacecraft sent to orbit at an altitude above the surface of the Sun of 10,000 km. Does it orbit the center of the Sun or the distant barycenter? Slowly move the spacecraft out a bit to 20,000 km and ask if it still orbits the Sun [now at 20,000 km altitude]. Now, move it out to 100,000, 1000,000, 100,000,000 km. At all times it still orbits the center of the Sun, regardless of where the barycenter is. Or do you think the spacecraft at some point decides not to orbit the sun anymore, but switches to orbit the barycenter instead?

48. Here is a peer reviewed paper showing that the sun has a strong and unequivocally influence over Earth’s climate. After reading it, Dr. Jorge Rabassa PhD, a glaciologist memebr of the Argentinean Academy of Sciences -and former staunch warmist- changed his stance in climate science making a public statement about the subject: “It is absurd to attribute global warming only to man’s activities.”
DE JAGER C & DUHAU S, 2010, ‘The variable solar dynamo and the forecast of solar activity. Influence in terrestrial surface temperature’, en Cossia J (ed.), Global Warming of the 21ths century, NOVA Science Publishers, available (novembee 2011) in:

49. meemoe_uk says:

If isotopes don’t correlate with the solar system barycentre, fine, but it doesn’t follow that there’s ” No evidence of planetary influence on solar activity “ .
The solar cycle is electro-magnetic in nature. It isn’t a gravitational phenomena. So looking at gravitational centre of mass of the solar system and finding no correlation with the isotope reconstruction of the solar cycle is poor grounds to conclude ” No evidence of planetary influence on solar activity’ “
If you are looking for correlation between the solar cycle and the planets, why not look at electromagnetic aspects of planets ?
I’ve found some evidence to suggest planetary influence on solar activity :
Jupiter has the strongest magnetic field of any planet in the solar system. Jupiter’s orbital period is 11.9 years, similar to the length of the schwabe solar cycle.
Considering how many papers on newly discovered electromagnetic activity in the solar system are written these days, and how little attention it gets on this blog ( i.e.zero ), can’t help think this article is bent towards Leif’s Chapmanian’s dream of minimal electromagnetic interaction in space physics.
REPLY: The title stays, tough noogies if you don’t like it. – Anthony

50. meemoe_uk says:
September 7, 2013 at 10:13 pm
The solar cycle is electro-magnetic in nature. It isn’t a gravitational phenomena.
Your ‘electro-magnetic’ is too vague [and see below]. The cycle is likely driven by the meridional circulation which in turn is driven by gravity [buoyancy].
If you are looking for correlation between the solar cycle and the planets, why not look at electromagnetic aspects of planets ?
You should say ‘magnetic’ instead. Plasmas cannot sustain electric fields [the charges short out immediately]. Anyway, the supersonic solar wind plasma streams away from the sun much faster than magnetic changes can flow upstream [at the Earth: 11 times faster]. In addition, the planet’s magnetospheres are tiny compared to the volume of the heliosphere.

51. meemoe_uk says:
September 7, 2013 at 10:13 pm
You know not whereof you speak. I was one the scientists who first showed [back in 1968] that the Sun’s and Earth’s magnetic fields are linked together at all times proving an interaction between the two space plasmas [it is called the Svalgaard-Mansurov effect – google it]

52. Paul Westhaver says:

Well I guess the science is settled now.
jeeese!
More like, the models and methods they tested against the outputs they measured, showed little cause and effect.
Fred Hoyle went to his grave denying the big bang.
The magnetosphere of jupiter is the largest object in the solar system aside from the sun and that was only recently discovered. There is nothing more detestable than a scientist claiming to have the final word…. on anything.

53. Paul Westhaver says:
September 7, 2013 at 10:45 pm
Well I guess the science is settled now.
I think it is premature to make such an absolute statement, but perhaps that is just me…
The magnetosphere of Jupiter is the largest object in the solar system aside from the sun
Yet is tiny compared to the heliosphere, occupying only 1/50,000 the of the sky seen from the Sun [like a quarter seen from a distance of 100 feet].

54. Hmmm.
Forget about the Newton’s mechanics here, the sun is an electromagnetic cauldron, its electromagnetic tentacles envelope all the planets, and those with strong magnetic fields do bite back.
Observational data during last 50 years suggest that the above may be more than just a fable:
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/PF.htm.
( Dr. S’s bogging prowess is boundless )

55. vukcevic says:
September 8, 2013 at 12:13 am
Forget about the Newton’s mechanics here, the sun is an electromagnetic cauldron, its electromagnetic tentacles envelope all the planets, and those with strong magnetic fields do bite back.
They cannot because the supersonic solar wind prevents magnetic fields to penetrate upstream. You can’t get upstream by rowing at 1 knot in a river flowing at 11 knots. Your inability to learn this is boundless.

56. eco-geek says:

The paper seems to be saying that there is no correlation between the solar systems barycentre and cosmogenic isotope production – I presume this maps inversely to solar magnetic field strength.
Now one commenter suggested there is a correlation between barycentre and global climate (mean temperature) which I would agree with.
Conclusion: Svensmarks theory of cloud formation through solar magnetic field strength modulation is not the whole story or a weaker effect than thought.
I have my own mechanism for this but there is no interest here.

57. phlogiston says:

The sunspot cycle is a nonlinear oscillator. Like other such systems eg the heartbeat and the unforced Belousov-Zhabotinsky reaction, these systems are repeatedly driven away from equilibrium toward periodic resetting perturbations. There is a good Wikipedia description:
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_system
Nonlinear oscillators can be unforced, strongly or weakly forced. In weak forcing there can be a complex relationship between the forcing frequency and the responsive system oscillation. This paper has maybe achieved its objective of failing to find obvious simple strong forcing. But if it did not look for weak nonlinear forcing from planetary orbits especially that of Jupiter then this cannot be ruled out.
It is interesting that one phenomenon of nonlinear oscillators is amplitude death- maybe solar cycle minima could fall into this category?

58. phlogiston says:
September 8, 2013 at 12:46 am
The sunspot cycle is a nonlinear oscillator.
It would be nice if it were, but I don’t think it is, as the processes that govern the build-up of the cycle and the decay of the cycle are completely different and not part of a single system oscillating about a central value. The build-up is largely deterministic, while the decay is a random process.

59. William Astley says:

William Astley says:
September 7, 2013 at 7:00 pm
Leif have you noticed that the solar large scale magnetic field intensity has dropped by 50%? What is your explanation, random noise?
Lief: It falls to zero every 11 years…
A Doubling of the Sun’s Coronal Magnetic Field during the Last 100 Years
Did not happen:
William: Surely you are not denying the fact the solar large scale magnetic field is becoming less cycle by cycle.
William: Yes, the solar large scale magnetic field passes through zero every 11 years. What is interesting is the average solar magnetic large scale field is becoming less cycle by cycle. Why?
http://www.solen.info/solar/polarfields/polar.html
It appears the mechanism that caused the solar large scale magnetic field to double in intensity during the last 100 years is now reversing causing the intensity of the solar large scale magnetic field to decrease.
A Doubling of the Sun’s Coronal Magnetic Field during the Last 100 Years
http://www.wdc.rl.ac.uk/wdcc1/papers/nature.htm
Evolution of the Sun’s large-scale magnetic field since the Maunder minimum
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v408/n6811/abs/408445a0.html
William Astley says:
September 7, 2013 at 7:00 pm
The fundamental model that is assumed for what creates the solar magnetic field and field variance is not correct.
Lief: Well, contrary to what you claim, it is reasonably well understood.
William:
It appears will have an opportunity to observe one of the most important scientific discoveries in the history of science. I can explain why the problem has not been solved and the history of scientific work related to the problem.
As I have stated there are piles of astronomical anomalies and solar system anomalies that are explained by what is causing the solar magnetic cycle. Galaxy formation and evolution, redshift anomalies, quasar jets, magtars, quasar very low frequency pulsation, quasar ejection, and so on.
Scientific teaching in preparation for those who are interesting and capable of solve complex physical problems should include a systematic presentation of anomalies and alternative theories. I have been following the astronomical anomalies for 20 years. The number of anomalies has not decreased and there is unequivocal evidence of structured anomalies. Structured anomalies cannot be explained by the standard mechanisms and point to a different mechanism which causes the structure and connections.
William:
As noted in this paper and papers I linked to above, the earth’s climate changes cyclically which requires a cyclic forcing function. If the sun is the cause of what is observed then the problem of explain the cyclic pattern mo ves from the earth systems to the sun which is the subject of this thread. i.e. What causes the solar magnetic cycle to change cyclically and what causes the solar magnetic cycle. The two issues are related.
As Svensmark notes the mechanism that causes the earth’s climate to change cyclically must also explain the polar see saw. (The observation should be called the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheet see saw rather than the polar see saw as Antarctic ice sheet is the only region of the planet that is out of sync in terms of how the planet’s temperature changes cyclically driven by the solar magnetic cycle change. Cyclically the Antarctic ice sheet cools when the Greenland ice sheet warms during a Dansgaard-Oeschger cycle and visa verse. Note planetary temperature as a whole follows the Greenland ice sheet cyclical temperature change; it is only the Antarctic ice sheet that is out of sync.
There is no known earth based mechanism that can cyclically change the earth’s temperature simultaneously affecting the Greenland Ice sheet and Antarctic ice sheet and causing the so called ice sheet see saw.
http://www.agu.org/pubs/crossref/2003/2003GL017115.shtml
Timing of abrupt climate change: A precise clock by Stefan Rahmstorf
Many paleoclimatic data reveal a approx. 1,500 year cyclicity of unknown origin. A crucial question is how stable and regular this cycle is. An analysis of the GISP2 ice core record from Greenland reveals that abrupt climate events appear to be paced by a 1,470-year cycle with a period that is probably stable to within a few percent; with 95% confidence the period is maintained to better than 12% over at least 23 cycles. This highly precise clock points to an origin outside the Earth system; oscillatory modes within the Earth system can be expected to be far more irregular in period.
http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0612145v1
The Antarctic climate anomaly and galactic cosmic ray
Contradictory trends in temperature in Antarctica and the rest of the world, which are evident on timescales from millennia to decades, provide a strong clue to what drives climate change. The southern continent is distinguished by its isolation and by its unusual response to changes in cloud cover.
Borehole temperatures in the ice sheets spanning the past 6000 years show Antarctica repeatedly warming when Greenland cooled, and vice versa (Fig. 1) [13, 14]. North-south oscillations of greater amplitude associated with Dansgaard-Oeschger events are evident in oxygenisotope data from the Wurm-Wisconsin glaciation[15]. The phenomenon has been called the polar see-saw[15, 16], but that implies a north-south symmetry that is absent. Greenland is better coupled to global temperatures than Antarctica is, and the fulcrum of the temperature swings is near the Antarctic Circle. A more apt term for the effect is the Antarctic climate anomaly.

60. phlogiston says:
September 8, 2013 at 12:46 am
This paper has maybe achieved its objective of failing to find obvious simple strong forcing.
The paper has a much more limited goal, namely to show that the Abreu et al. calculation of statistical significance of something in excess of 99.99999% is erroneous.

61. Leif Svalgaard says: September 8, 2013 at 12:31 am
They cannot because the supersonic solar wind prevents magnetic fields to penetrate upstream.
Doc
You are misleading your readers. Your analogy is wrong, it is not ‘puddle boat up the river’, it is puddle boat in a whirlpool.
It is an electromagnetic close circuit, and you know it far better than I do, but for those interested in the matter, rather than quote numerous papers on the ‘magnetic flux ropes’, or ‘magnetic clouds’ emanating from the sun, here is pictorial set of links .
However, I would single this one from the US navy (the people who know)
http://wwwppd.nrl.navy.mil/prediction/storms.html
Close Electromagnetic Circuit not a ‘paddle boat up the river’ is operative mechanism here. Until you consider the science of the ‘solar magnetic flux ropes’ as it is currently understood any discussion on the subject is a waste of time.

62. vukcevic says:
September 8, 2013 at 1:12 am
Until you consider the science of the ‘solar magnetic flux ropes’ as it is currently understood any discussion on the subject is a waste of time.
The supersonic flow is not an analogy and holds also for flux ropes, but you are right, it is a waste of time to teach you. Solar magnetic flux ropes are expelled from the Sun and flow with the solar wind [in fact are part of the solar wind]. They are not part of ‘closed electromagnetic circuits’. You will not find that phrase in the article you linked to [or any other link about flux ropes]. And you forget that it is not only the US Navy that knows. I know as well.

63. lgl says:

Leif
The Earth+Moon orbits the center of the Sun as do all other planet+moon systems …
There is so much confusion about what orbits what

And you are adding to that confusion. No planet+moon system orbits the center of the Sun. They all orbit the center of mass of all the mass they are orbiting plus the mass of the planet+moon system. No wonder you still don’t understand why the planets affect the Sun.

64. phlogiston says:

Leif Svalgaard on September 8, 2013 at 12:56 am
phlogiston says:September 8, 2013 at 12:46 am
The sunspot cycle is a nonlinear oscillator.
It would be nice if it were, but I don’t think it is, as the processes that govern the build-up of the cycle and the decay of the cycle are completely different and not part of a single system oscillating about a central value. The build-up is largely deterministic, while the decay is a random process.
I cany prove mathematically that its a nonlinear oscillator. It satisfies two of the classic pre- requisites, it is an open dissipative system with heat constantly moving from the core outward, and it is usually in a far from equilibrium state. But it is possible that the sunspot cycle is driven by linear processes only.

65. vukcevic says:
September 8, 2013 at 1:26 am
and it is, but for those who like the challenge here is a link to a good article
http://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2009/17/aa10971-08/aa10971-08.html
on the evolution of the ‘solar magnetic flux ropes’,

Which does also not talk about ‘closed electromagnetic circuits’ nor ‘feedbacks’
lgl says:
September 8, 2013 at 1:29 am
No planet+moon system orbits the center of the Sun. They all orbit the center of mass of all the mass they are orbiting plus the mass of the planet+moon system.
Apart from the tautology you are dead wrong. Does the ISS orbit the center of the Earth? moving as it does at a constant distance [6370+415 km] from the center.

66. phlogiston says:
September 8, 2013 at 1:33 am
I can prove mathematically that its a nonlinear oscillator.
The sun is not even an oscillator as there is no restoring force.

67. Leif Svalgaard says:
September 8, 2013 at 1:25 am
They are not part of ‘closed electromagnetic circuits’.
Oh yea, the folks at Los Alamos National Laboratory were dreaming when produced this illustration
http://www.swepam.lanl.gov/Figures/Figure07.JPG
Flux ropes push your ‘common garden’ solar wind out of the way.

68. Leif Svalgaard says:
September 8, 2013 at 1:35 am
Which does also not talk about ‘closed electromagnetic circuits’ nor ‘feedbacks’
Correct on the feedback. Electromagnetic feedback is my hypothesis
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/PF.htm
based on the scientific analysis by many solar researches and supported by the data from your own institution !

69. lgl says:

Leif
Does the ISS orbit the center of the Earth?
Yes, because it does not orbit Earth+Moon. If it were it would orbit the center of mass of its own mass and the mass of E+M.

70. William Astley says:
September 8, 2013 at 1:01 am
What is interesting is the average solar magnetic large scale field is becoming less cycle by cycle. Why?
Because solar cycles vary, they become stronger for a while, then become weaker for a while, then stronger, then weaker, etc, just like the weather gets warmer, then colder, then warmer, etc. We have a pretty good explanation of why the sun does that.
It appears the mechanism that caused the solar large scale magnetic field to double in intensity during the last 100 years
It appears that it did not double during the last 100 years. Here is what it has been doing: Figure 10 of http://www.leif.org/research/2009JA015069.pdf
It appears will have an opportunity to observe one of the most important scientific discoveries in the history of science.
It appears you have an exaggerated opinion of your ability.
vukcevic says:
September 8, 2013 at 1:44 am
the folks at Los Alamos National Laboratory were dreaming when produced this illustration
http://www.swepam.lanl.gov/Figures/Figure07.JPG

You are dreaming if you find ‘closed electromagnetic circuits’ there.
Flux ropes push your ‘common garden’ solar wind out of the way.
The solar wind is composed of plasma with different speeds pushing plasma ahead out of the way, flux ropes among them. After a while flux ropes may even disconnect from the Sun. There are no ‘closed electromagnetic circuits’ involved. Find a paper that says there is and we can continue.
vukcevic says:
September 8, 2013 at 1:51 am
Electromagnetic feedback is my hypothesis based on the scientific analysis by many solar researches
and supported by the data from your own institution !
not at all ‘supported’ as you are just curve fitting.
lgl says:
September 8, 2013 at 2:01 am
“Does the ISS orbit the center of the Earth?”
Yes, because it does not orbit Earth+Moon.

Does the Earth orbit the center of the Sun?
Yes, because it does not orbit the barycenter.
——-
We are now in full kook-mode, with the usual suspects in full swing peddling their own stuff instead of staying on topic and discussing the paper which is the topic of this thread.

71. lgl says:

Leif
Does the Earth orbit the center of the Sun?
Yes, because it does not orbit the barycenter.

No, it orbits the center of mass of the Sun, Mercury and Venus. How is the gravity of Mercury and Venus magically turned off so that it does not influence the Earth? We are not off topic. Everybody need to understand this very basics before judging whether or not the planets can have any influence on the Sun.

72. lgl says:
September 8, 2013 at 2:33 am
No, it orbits the center of mass of the Sun, Mercury and Venus
So the Earth does not orbit the solar system barycenter, right?

73. lgl says:

Leif
Right, but a spacecraft at ten times Sun-Pluto distance would.

74. Leo Smith says:

I read the papers lined here with interest.
The south African one showing that the effective earth/sun distance is modulated by planetary activity is interesting if only for the blatant simplicity of the calculation that shows that at the very least this MUST modulate received insolation by a statistically significant amount. So that’s one factoid that the IPCC simply ignored.
As far as planetary activity modulating internal magnetohydrodynamics – case not proven.
Svensmark? I like Svensmark. He plods along a track, checking every stage, doing more experiments to test the hypotheses of others, and is slowly building a case for galactic interactions with earth’s climate.
The fundamental point though, is not who is right, but who is wrong. The IPCC. The science seems further from being settled than ever, and as fast as the IPCC comes up with plausible mechanisms (that don’t stand up to scrutiny) as to why global warming is really happening but we just can’t detect it any more, other scientists are showing other mechanisms equally as plausible as CO2 was when it first appeared.
Remember the IPPCC position was based on the fact that at the time the world was warming up, there was no explanation apart from CO2 as they saw it, and although CO2 itself wouldn’t actually affect it that much, if multiplied by positive feedback factors it would.
So the whole IPCC position rests on two increasingly shaky propositions.
(i) that all unaccountable global warming was driven by CO2 change since that was the only known factor they had in play
(ii) that some additional unknown factor must be amplifying it. (lambda/climate sensitivity et al)
These are shaky assumptions at best.
Papers are continually being published showing that more factors than they accounted for are in play.
Whilst they argue over the true value of lambda, the actual science is increasingly making it look like an irrelevant argument altogether..
CO2 will it seems turn out to be probably no more than a bit player in the climate change game, with Svensmark’s clouds and cosmic radiation, and pure solar system geometry playing at least as big, if not bigger parts.
The big news is therefore, the gradual erosion of the IPCCS foundation stone, that CO2 and CO2 alone, is the only explanation for late 20th century warming, by a rising sea level of alternative theories that show at least to similar levels of confidence, that several other factors could equally plausibly be in play.
The only beneficial result of the IPCC is that we are now intensely interested in them, and that can only be good for the science.

75. lgl says:
September 8, 2013 at 2:46 am
Right, but a spacecraft at ten times Sun-Pluto distance would.
Before we get to that, consider the situation where the Earth is on one side of the Sun and Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter are on the other side lined up with the Earth. If only the Sun, Mercury, and Venus are considered as contributing to the point around which the Earth orbits, what turns off the gravity of Jupiter so that it does not contribute?

76. Leo Smith says:
September 8, 2013 at 2:53 am
The south African one showing that the effective earth/sun distance is modulated by planetary activity is interesting if only for the blatant simplicity of the calculation that shows that at the very least this MUST modulate received insolation by a statistically significant amount. So that’s one factoid that the IPCC simply ignored.
I think you missed my response to that [or I was not clear enough]. At the times that paper mentions http://www.leif.org/research/DavidA10.png we know in other ways what the distances to the Sun were and can calculate [and actually measure – the black curve] TSI at those points and the values do NOT match what the South African paper claims they should be [red dots] http://www.leif.org/research/DavidA11.png so there is no such modulation.

77. lgl says:

Leif
You are a bit off track again. The Earth does not orbit Jupiter. Jupiters contribution is to make all the object inside its orbit to revolve around the BC and accelerate the inner planets from time to time.

78. Dr. S.
As usual, you got that wrong way around:
Vukcevic: Electromagnetic feedback is my hypothesis based on the scientific analysis by many solar researches
Give it a bit of time, last 10 years since its inception your data (Stamford WSO) is supporting it pretty well. No one else has come so closely with actual numerical verification.
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/PF.htm
It is often the case that the science is advanced by those who look for new and previously not known i.e. forwarding new ideas. It is often the case that the science has forgotten about those who oppose new ideas.

79. lgl says:
September 8, 2013 at 3:06 am
You are a bit off track again. The Earth does not orbit Jupiter.
Still does not remove Jupiter’s contribution. So my question stands. And the ‘inside the orbit’ bit is nonsense.
vukcevic says:
September 8, 2013 at 3:09 am
Vukcevic: Electromagnetic feedback is my hypothesis based on the scientific analysis by many solar researches
Which ‘scientific analysis’ by whom discuss electromagnetic feedback?
No one else has come so closely with actual numerical verification.
Curve fitting is curve fitting. Anybody can fit it with a better curve. And it fails going back in time.
It is often the case that the science is advanced by those who look for new
What you do is not science and there is no advance.

80. lgl says:

Leif
I did answer your question. Jupiter moves the Sun-Me-Ve-Ea center of mass around the SSBC making the inner planets follow the Sun around the SSBC. Of course you can not include Jupiter (or any of the outer planets) when the Earth does not orbit Jupiter.

81. lgl says:
September 8, 2013 at 3:34 am
I don’t think you did. [or I didn’t get it]. If the Earth does not orbit the Center of the Sun, but the Center of Mass of Sun+Mercury+Venus, the distance from the Earth to the center of the Sun would be modulated by the positions of Mercury and Venus, right?

82. lgl says:

Leif
Yes, like if the Sun were a double star and there were only the Earth, one would ‘modulate’ the distance, i.e the Earth would orbit the center of mass of the two stars.

83. lgl says:
September 8, 2013 at 4:10 am
“the distance from the Earth to the center of the Sun would be modulated by the positions of Mercury and Venus, right?”
Yes, like if the Sun were a double star

Except that there is no such modulation. Here is the FFT of the distance [JPL Horizon] between the Sun and the Earth http://www.leif.org/research/Barycenter11.png There is a strong 1-year period [366.36 days], and because the orbit is not a circle also a 1/2 year period and then, of course, a lunar period too. But no trace of Mercury, Venus, Jupiter, or any of the other planets…

84. wayne Job says:

Leif, you keep telling us that the suns output varies little and is not the cause of our warming or cooling. Yet the earth warms and cools over various cyclic time periods i.e. Maunder minimum etc that seems to be related to the sunspot numbers, and the biggie ice ages every 100,000 years.
Some thing causes these strangely cyclical events and as the sun appears to be our only heater, what in your opinion?
I have found that in a long and intriguing life that it is the rebels that think outside the square that are inventive and in science often proved correct in the long term. Some thing is causing our climate to vary, if your view of the solar system can not explain it, maybe your science is less than complete.
Putting down people with different ideas and calling them Kook,s is less than scientific.

85. wayne Job says:
September 8, 2013 at 4:17 am
Yet the earth warms and cools over various cyclic time periods i.e. Maunder minimum etc that seems to be related to the sunspot numbers, and the biggie ice ages every 100,000 years.
Going further back in time, solar activity does not line up with solar activity, and the ice ages are not caused by the Sun but [mainly] by Jupiter changing the shape of the Earth’s orbit.
maybe your science is less than complete.
Nobody’s science is complete, except the ones with ‘different ideas’ I referred to.

86. lgl says:

Leif
It’s not visible on that scale then. Make Mercury the size of Jupiter. Do you still think the Earth would orbit the center of the Sun?

87. lgl says:
September 8, 2013 at 4:31 am
It’s not visible on that scale then. Make Mercury the size of Jupiter. Do you still think the Earth would orbit the center of the Sun?
The JPL HORIZON Ephemerides are accurate to 14 significant digits, which is of the order of a few centimeters, so nothing wrong with the scale: the modulation should show if it is there. Note that there is also no sign of Jupiter or any of the other planets, but well of the Moon.
About making Mercury larger, I’m not sure, at some point it will make a difference. We could make Mercury ten times more massive than the Sun and ask the same question. Possibly, the answer has to do with how we define ‘orbit’.
As this little exercise has shown, you may not have the grip on this as you thought you had.

88. lgl says:

Leif
B t w, there is some ‘noise’ in your FFT below 300 days which would match the Ea-Ve line-up.

89. PJF says:

It’s not visible on that scale then. Make Mercury the size of Jupiter. Do you still think the Earth would orbit the center of the Sun?
lgl, I think you are correct on the orbital dynamics aspect, but that doesn’t mean there is a planetary influence on solar activity. Scientific interest in solar activity long pre-dates the contemporary climate controversy, and planetary influence is/was an obvious candidate as an actor that has been investigated many times with no positive result. There isn’t a conspiracy to silence the planets.

90. commieBob says:

It is trivially true that any object in an orbital gravitational system will affect the orbit of every other object. That effect does not, however, have to be measurable. 😉

91. lgl says:
September 8, 2013 at 4:55 am
B t w, there is some ‘noise’ in your FFT below 300 days which would match the Ea-Ve line-up.
There is, indeed, but of extraordinarily small amplitude, and there should be some. The conceptual problem you have is that the center-of-mass is defined linearly R = sum(m(i)r(i))/sum(mi), but the gravitational force goes inversely with the square of the distances, so the sum of the gravitational force on some bodies on a test body is not the same as if all the other masses were at the center of mass. Consider the example of four identical masses spaced on a line 1 unit part. The center of mass of the three right-most would be at distance 2 from the left-most. If you thought that the gravitational force on the leftmost would be three times the individual masses divided by the square of the distance to the center-of-mass you would get 3/4. If you add up the forces for each of the masses you would get 1/1+1/4+1/9=23/18 and not 3/4.

92. PJF says:

As this little exercise has shown, you may not have the grip on this as you thought you had.
Actually Leif, strictly on the orbital dynamics aspect, lgl has been correct and you have been wrong. Suggesting that the principle might change at “some point” if masses are altered, and getting into semantics about “orbit”, won’t help.

93. lgl says:

Leif
And the Sun is extraordinarily large compared to Venus. I agree ‘orbit the center of mass’ is an approximation but now answer my question; with Mercury the size of Jupiter, would the Earth orbit the center of the Sun? Or with a double star, what would it orbit?

94. PJF says:
September 8, 2013 at 5:19 am
Actually Leif, strictly on the orbital dynamics aspect, lgl has been correct and you have been wrong. Suggesting that the principle might change at “some point” if masses are altered, and getting into semantics about “orbit”, won’t help.
I think it is question of magnitude as I explained in my calculation of the difference between center-of-mass and gravity. One is linear, the other one inversely quadratic. I agree that the semantic bit was weak [as I also qualified by saying I was not sure – still thinking this through]. I think that the ephemerides from JPL showed that the Earth did not orbit the center of mass of Sun, Mercury, and Venus, because [as lgl also thought] that would give a clear signature in the FFT spectrum.

95. Dudley Horscroft says:

This has got really complicated, and I wonder if those complicating it have really thought through their theories.
Back to square 1. If we can ignore ALL forces acting on the earth other than gravitation, according to Newton the earth would proceed on a straight line unless some force made it deviate. The major force is that of the Sun, so it orbits the Sun in an elliptical path (remember a circle is just a special case of an ellipse when the major and minor axes are equal). Add Venus into the system, and the orbit will be perturbed from the perfect ellipse it otherwise would be. The perturbation will be different when Venus is near (maximum gravitational attraction) and when Venus is on the other side of the Sun (minimal attraction). So when Venus is near the orbit will be a bit more sharply curved, and when Venus is the other side of the Sun it will be less curved.
Instead add Jupiter into the system. When Earth is near Jupiter, the perturbation due to Jupiter will be of the opposite sign from that when the Earth is near Venus. The net attraction of the Sun/Jupiter system will be less, and one could say that the earth’s path will be ‘straightened’ a bit. When Jupiter is on the far side, the net attraction will be increased, and the earth’s path more sharply curved.
So the centre of curvature of the earth’s path will be constantly moving as the various planets add or subtract their attractions to the Sun’s attraction. The earth’s orbit will be determined by the resultant attraction of all the planets and the Sun. Is the centre of curvature of the earth’s orbit then the Barycentre or some other point?
Which is a long way from the original proposition – I think!
Add Einstein and Relativity, does that make a difference?

96. lgl says:

Leif
Sorry I didn’t see that comment in between.
Make Mercury ten times more massive than the Sun is fine with me. What will happen? The Sun will start orbiting Mercury right? But following your logic the Earth will continue orbiting the center of the Sun.

97. lgl says:
September 8, 2013 at 5:27 am
I agree ‘orbit the center of mass’ is an approximation but now answer my question; with Mercury the size of Jupiter, would the Earth orbit the center of the Sun? Or with a double star, what would it orbit?
My answer would be this system http://www.leif.org/research/Barycenter10.png of a double star with planets and moons [and even a satellite around one of the moons]. If you bring the two stars closer and closer the orbits of the planets and moons will be distorted or perhaps even destroyed at some point, until the two stars are so close that they act as one. The point is that things are not simple and have to be calculated precisely. the simple-minded center-of-mass ideas won’t work. Various orbit-calculators exist that can do this for any given configuration. I think Carsten may even have one. If he is still here, perhaps he could see what happens if we put a Jupiter in place of Mercury.

98. Ian Wilson says:

As per usual, Leif gets the details wrong. The Earth revolves around the Sun in an elliptical orbit with the centre-of-mass of the Earth-Sun system at one of the focii..
The centre-of-mass of the Earth-Sun system is about 500 Km closer to the Earth than the centre of the Sun. This means that the only short-term changes in distance between the Earth and Sun will those caused by the Moon and the (annular) ellipticity of the Earth’s orbit.
Of course this has nothing to do with ruling out all of the potential effects of that Venus and the Earth could have upon the outer convective layers of the Sun.
[Sophist shield up] .

99. lgl says:
September 8, 2013 at 5:35 am
Make Mercury ten times more massive than the Sun is fine with me. What will happen? The Sun will start orbiting Mercury right? But following your logic the Earth will continue orbiting the center of the Sun.
Suppose you make Mercury grow very slowly. In the beginning the Earth will still orbit the Sun. In the end Mercury might steal the Earth. I can’t tell without doing the calculation. My point is that the gravitational force from a collection of bodies is not the same as if you put all the mass of the bodies at their center of mass.

100. lgl says:
September 8, 2013 at 4:55 am
B t w, there is some ‘noise’ in your FFT below 300 days which would match the Ea-Ve line-up.
The first plot was with 100 years of data. Expanding to 500 years I get http://www.leif.org/research/Barycenter12.png Now the ‘noise’ is gone and you can see the 3rd harmonic, and even little hints of the Moon’s orbit not being circular either. So, we have to accept that the Earth does not orbit the barycenter of the Sun+Mercury+Venus. Perhaps someone can explain why there is no sign of modulation by any of the planets in the distance between the Sun and the Earth.

101. Curve fitting is curve fitting. Anybody can fit it with a better curve. And it fails going back in time.
Doc, you are talking trough your hat again:
1. There is no data prior to what is shown here
http://www.vukcevic.talktalk.net/PF.htm
2. This is not any curve, just in case you forgotten
11.862 is Jupiter’s siderial period
19.859 is Jupiter-Saturn synodic period
You change numbers by even small percentage whole thing gets out of kilter.
Have a go !

102. vukcevic says:
September 8, 2013 at 6:29 am
There is no data prior to what is shown here
Yes there is. I have shown you that a long time ago. For example: for the 1964 minimum the polar fields were so weak they could not be measured. Yet our curve shows a very strong polar field.

103. Ian Wilson says:
September 8, 2013 at 5:41 am
The Earth revolves around the Sun in an elliptical orbit with the centre-of-mass of the Earth-Sun system at one of the focii..
lgl says around the center-of-mass of Sun+Venus+Mercury. Take it up with him.

104. See - owe to Rich says:

“No, it orbits the center of mass of the Sun, Mercury and Venus. How is the gravity of Mercury and Venus magically turned off so that it does not influence the Earth?”. (And numerous similar comments – of which I mostly agree with Dudley Horscroft.)
The essential point is that the Earth doesn’t orbit anything. It is subject to continually varying inverse square forces whose resultant does not point to the barycentre, since as Leif said that is a linear vector average of mass. Approximately the Earth orbits the Sun, because that is the biggest force, and everything else is just perturbations from that.
As a corollary, the Sun doesn’t orbit the SSB in any meaningful manner, i.e. the resultant of planetary forces on it does not in general point in the line between the SSB and the solar centre.
Does that help?
Rich.

105. Yes there is. I have shown you that a long time ago. For example: for the 1964 minimum the polar fields were so weak they could not be measured.
No there is not !
You were then young and naïve man, being misled by your Russian ‘official’ host tovarisch Severniy, I looked at his data and they are full of holes.
I gather he even took you around lunatic asylum (???!!!!) possibly to show you the ‘advancement of the science application to those the Soviet system pronounced to be kooks.
Do you really think that tovarisch Severniy would present you with good data at height of the cold war, at beginning of the space age, following the Cuban crisis and the President Kennedy’s assassination ? ? ?

106. lgl says:

Leif
How clever. Why not use 1 mill. yrs of data, then you can smooth out the 1 yr peak too. But the 292 days ‘noise’ is not gone and you can’t make it go away because Ea Ve and Sun line up every 292 days. Anyway your method is flawed because the planets will interact regardless of what they are orbiting.

107. Max™ says:
September 7, 2013 at 7:20 pm
applying torque to magnetic field lines embedded in a ball of magnetic fluid is going to do something… I don’t think that something will be obvious,
=============
as the center of the sun moves away from the barycenter, the effect will be to increase the bulge in the sun’s shape in the plane of the orbit relative to the barycenter. this is due to the gravitational attraction towards the barycenter and the centrifugal force away from the barycenter.
this could lead to all sorts of interesting results, depending if the plane of the barycenter was aligned with the sun’s rotation or not. In effect you would get two bulges in the sun’s shape. one from rotation and the other from the orbit around the barycenter. at times they could reinforce each other, at other times they could be orthogonal.
Over time, the relative motion of these bulges would be cyclical, inducing cyclical behavior within the sun itself.

108. See – owe to Rich says:
September 8, 2013 at 6:58 am
As a corollary, the Sun doesn’t orbit the SSB in any meaningful manner
============
whether there is meaning in the orbit is a question for philosophy. physics tells us otherwise.

109. For example: for the 1964 minimum the polar fields were so weak they could not be measured. Yet our curve shows a very strong polar field.
Doc, that is another nonsense, you know it well, and you said often enough that the polar fields are built by decaying sunspots semi-neutralised magnetic field towards the poles. Yet in 1960 we had by far strongest solar cycle ever, SC19 , the source of the 1964 polar field.
That would totally invalidate all the solar science from Babcock, Leyton and Parker to the present day.
So which one is going to be then?

110. Carsten Arnholm says:

Leif Svalgaard says:
September 8, 2013 at 5:41 am
lgl says:
September 8, 2013 at 5:27 am
I agree ‘orbit the center of mass’ is an approximation but now answer my question; with Mercury the size of Jupiter, would the Earth orbit the center of the Sun? Or with a double star, what would it orbit?
My answer would be this system http://www.leif.org/research/Barycenter10.png of a double star with planets and moons [and even a satellite around one of the moons]. If you bring the two stars closer and closer the orbits of the planets and moons will be distorted or perhaps even destroyed at some point, until the two stars are so close that they act as one. The point is that things are not simple and have to be calculated precisely. the simple-minded center-of-mass ideas won’t work. Various orbit-calculators exist that can do this for any given configuration. I think Carsten may even have one. If he is still here, perhaps he could see what happens if we put a Jupiter in place of Mercury.

I’m still here, after a pause. If we swap Mercury with Jupiter, strange things will occur. I will see if I can find out what happens. My orbit-calculator is not 100% precise, but with short enough time-steps it should be able to answer this I think. So we simply swap the masses of Jupiter and Mercury and see what happens? I’ll see what I can do and report back.

111. Leif Svalgaard says:
September 7, 2013 at 8:53 pm
Manuel is a crank and has shown no such thing. The tidal forces do not care what material the Sun is made of.
Catch up with the times. Labeling people neither promotes scientific understanding nor is it socially correct. Manuel shows measurable data to identify the Sun as layers of stratified elements with the heaviest at the core. The evidence suggests our Sun has a neutron pulsar at its center and it is this neutron core that releases the abundance of hydrogen.
I am certain that even you can appreciate that if our Sun is the child of a supernova, and the inner planets of our solar system have iron cores, then there is no way in hell the Sun could form out of pure hydrogen.
If the mass of the Sun is primarily at its core, then yes, the tidal forces do care what material the Sun is made of. There would be more inertia with the core than their would be with the Sun’s upper layers. It would be a viscous wobble, which would explain the mechanism of the Sun’s magnetohydrodynamics.

112. lgl says:

Carsten
Actually there is no need. Leif can just repeat the exercise using Neptune instead and then try to explain away the ~12.8 yr variation in its distance to the Sun. (or Uranus with the 14 yr cycle)

113. Tony McGough says:

Dr Svalgaard puts a lot of effort into this site from time to time, but -try as I might – I learn very little from him. The kernel of his teaching seems to be obscured by acidic put-downs of those who are not fully on board with him.
Dr Svalgaard: could you perhaps put the same energy into a guest article, geared to those – like me – who have a basic scientific education, but no specialised knowledge of solar dynamics? It may save time (no sniping) and actually teach us something. WUWT flourishes thus …

114. PJF says:

Ian Wilson wrote:
As per usual, Leif gets the details wrong.
Not to blow smoke, but it’s actually very unusual. I read carefully several times (since I usually am wrong) to check that Leif really was saying that all the planet+moon combos in the solar system orbit the centre of the sun.
Thinking about this is helping me through a mundane task at work, so it’s all useful. Am currently stuck on Leif’s FFT of the Earth-Sun distance. Something doesn’t sit right.

115. Willis Eschenbach says:

A couple of points here:
First, my thanks to Leif for his patience in pushing back against the folks that think that solar magnetohydrodynamics is some simple process, or that a body in free-fall experiences anything but free-fall. [And tides, which in the Sun-Jupiter case are about 1 mm high.]
Next, regarding Hershel and wheat prices, I’d prepared a post on that a couple of months ago, but I didn’t want to re-open the subject. In any case, the short answer is, Herschel’s data was a joke. He looked at a few periods. Even Herschel wasn’t impressed, saying (emphasis mine)

The subject, however, being so new, it will be proper to conclude, by adding, that this prediction ought not to be relied on by any one, with more confidence than the arguments which have been brought forwards in this Paper may appear to deserve.

And the long answer is, I found more British wheat price data extending to just past 1900. I digitized and analyzed it. There is no, repeat no, relationship between British wheat prices and solar activity.
I’d publish the post, but solar questions attract fruit flies, as this post amply demonstrates, and I’m not up for all the wielding of the fly swatter that that would entail. Unlike Leif, I tend to get cross and say bad words after about the third go-round … not good for my blood pressure.
For those interested, the original Herschel comment is here.
Menzel’s extension of the Herschel data is here.
And the digitized data from those two documents are in my spreadsheet here.
So please … no more babble about sunspots and wheat prices. It’s nonsense, and if you don’t think so, do what I did:
Go look at the actual data
w.

116. PJF says:

Willis, you’re supposed to be on holiday. It’s a lovely evening (at least here in the East Midlands) so you should be looking at something better than people being wrong on the internet.

117. Carla says:

Leif Svalgaard says:
September 8, 2013 at 6:33 am
vukcevic says:
September 8, 2013 at 6:29 am
There is no data prior to what is shown here
Yes there is. I have shown you that a long time ago. For example: for the 1964 minimum the polar fields were so weak they could not be measured. Yet our curve shows a very strong polar field.

Lots of talk about planets orbiting around their centers of mass.
Ok .. those planetary masses all have a pseudo current sheet, which is around their magnetic fields.
Those planetary current sheaths are moving in and out the heliocurrent sheet as they rotate and orbit about in the masses. When the planetary current sheets are in line, might they also ‘feedback’ to the heliocurrent sheet?
I am not saying upwind here Leif, but connected to the heliocurrent sheet..
which is connected to the L1shell rotating current sheet.. which is connected to neighboring rotating current sheet shells..
which is connected to the spiral arm rotating current sheet..
which is connected to………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Centers of mass what a mess..

118. Carla: If you don’t want to have to give awkward answers, keep ’em asking the wrong questions.

119. That is but one study and other studies reach a different conclusion. I never put much faith in one study especially when it come to solar or climate.
In addition those that do subscribe to the angular solar momentum theory correctly forecasted this prolonged solar minimum while many using so called conventional metholds were way way off.
This study does not convince or impress me in the least.

120. Thank YOU TALLBOKE, this study is akin to AGW theory which is a joke at best.

121. Salvatore: Claiming to prove a negative is always a risky business. It shows they are running scared of the rapid advances being made by the solar planetary theory in the literature.
Abreu et al have had another paper published since the one Comoron and Bluster tried to attack.

122. Those that subscribe to some other explanation for solar cycles have not shown they have the skill to use what they believe in to predict properly. Until that changes their theories are no better then the angular momentum theory, that does have a basis to fall back on if one looks at past history, and planet angular momentum configurations versus solar activity..
Past history may be hindsight but I VALUE it.

123. Exactly, they are scared and I might add clueless. Geoff Sharp’s work in this area has been sensational!

124. Many ,many have done extensive work in this area and have reached an entirely different conclusion.

125. This is so much like AGW theory ,both have nothing to back up their claims.

126. As I speak solar flux sub 100 and this is the predicted solar max. by the so called conventional solar scientist. Next prediction please.

127. Carla says:

tallbloke says:
September 8, 2013 at 10:59 am
Carla: If you don’t want to have to give awkward answers, keep ‘em asking the wrong questions.

The solar helio current sheet is conjoined with the interstellar magnetic field which is turning out to be a rotating current sheet. And well so all the planetary bodies have currents, sheets and fields..
Just helping to build on the CMB in the local vicinity. You know that that background is partly due to “ITS” interaction with astrospheres.. ah like our sun..
Do the planets in their orbits disrupt and cause instabilities in the current sheet, sure, all kinds of humps bumps and holes .. spaghetti magnetic fields too..

tallbloke said here on September 8, 2013 at 10:03 am:

It looks like Cameron and Schussler borrowed Willis’ blunderbuss for this one. We took a look back in July when it went up on ARXiV. It’s bad analysis basically. I won’t go into it now but anyone still interested can get the skinny here:
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/07/28/cameron-and-schussler-no-evidence-for-planetary-influence-on-solar-activity/

tallbloke said there on July 29, 2013 at 12:19 pm (bold added):

After the kicking handed out on the Callebaut and de Jaeger paper, I very much doubt Anthony will be making a song and dance about the Cameron and Schussler paper on WUWT. He must by now be beginning to get the feeling that Leif has been pulling the wool over his eyes all these years.
The solar-planetary theory is powering forward thanks to the unstinting efforts of its proponents!

*smirk*
Ah heck, Ian Wilson said there on July 29, 2013 at 3:29 am:

I am sure that Anthony (Watts) and his pit bull (aka Leif) will have a field day with this paper. That will be until they see the backup papers from the Abreu et al. group which will clinch the deal.

Calling Leif a pit bull is an upgrade, around here Vuk and company treat him like a yapping little terrier.
So Leif is now the Watts’ attack dog? Kenji will be so upset!
As to the “discussion” there, sounds like a big echo chamber. The believers just keep making similar noises until they get a resonance they like, then call it a consensus.
I may learn slow, but at least I learn here. If I wanted to see mutual brainwashing to a common set of delusions I’d watch MSNBC.

129. Carla says:

Think of it this way Tallbloke..
If the sun is in free fall analogous to a whirlpool or drain, how are the subsidiaries in the drain pool going to get enough momentum to go back up the whirlpool drain to make a difference?

130. Luther Wu says:

Ian W says:
September 7, 2013 at 4:38 pm
“There are those that would contend that a quiet sun has been shown to cause climate change. The noted astronomer William Herschel first put this forward. “
___________________
Yes, the contention is out there. Show me the data which supports the contention.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
” The discussion is not way off topic –”
____________________________
Tell me how the statement that ‘the sun is the energy source’ is really meaningful to the discussion…
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“I presume someone has thought to follow Landscheidt and track what the barycenter path was in Dalton and Maunder and compare its motion then to its motion now?”
______________________
Didn’t make any difference then, either… afaics
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
“Or is your mind made up already? Just think a simple check and you could shoot down all those tin foil hat theories – or not ;-)”
________________________
Just so you know, my interest in solar influences on our climate is from an amateur’s (often sophomoric) perspective, but I’ve learned a thing or two. If I made an incorrect statement, then show me, as others here have.
If the sun does go relatively quiescent for a prolonged period, ala Dalton, then we shall see- maybe, but where’s the proof of influence so far?

131. Luther Wu says:

Carla says:
September 8, 2013 at 11:33 am
Do the planets in their orbits disrupt and cause instabilities in the current sheet, sure, all kinds of humps bumps and holes .. spaghetti magnetic fields too..
_______________________
…and not a single residual effect from the harmonica virgins harmonic convergence…

132. phlogiston says:

Leif Svalgaard on September 8, 2013 at 1:39 am
phlogiston says:September 8, 2013 at 1:33 am
I can prove mathematically that its a nonlinear oscillator.
The sun is not even an oscillator as there is no restoring force.
I said I cant prove it. Not can. But I misspelt it.

133. vukcevic says:
September 8, 2013 at 7:30 am
Doc, that is another nonsense, you know it well, and you said often enough that the polar fields are built by decaying sunspots semi-neutralised magnetic field towards the poles. Yet in 1960 we had by far strongest solar cycle ever, SC19 , the source of the 1964 polar field.
That would totally invalidate all the solar science from Babcock, Leyton and Parker to the present day.

If the polar field were just determined by the current cycle, then a large cycle would result in a large polar field which in the B-L mechanism in turn would predict a large next cycle. In this manner cycles would continue to grow or at best all have the same size. You would never get a small cycle after a large one, but we do often get that, e.g. cycle 20 and cycle 5 or even cycles 23 and 24 following the strong cycle 22. Or get a strong one following a small one, like SC21 following SC20.
The solution to the problem is that the formation of the polar fields has a large element of randomness in it, the magnetic field elements being jerked around by the convective solar granulation. Of the magnetic field erupted in sunspots, only a small part [between 1/100 and 1/1000] actually makes it to the poles. The resulting polar magnetic flux is as small as the flux of only about 5 of the ~3000 active regions erupting during a sunspot cycle and observations show that the flux arrives by the chance survival of a small number [5-8] of flux ‘surges’. So even as we would expect that the larger amount of flux from a large cycle would give the us more flux ‘to work with’ [and so explains why we often have several large cycles in a row] the random element is so large that sooner or later that progression would by chance break down and we get a small polar field with an attendant small following cycle, as observed.
vukcevic says:
September 8, 2013 at 7:03 am
You were then young and naïve man, being misled by your Russian ‘official’ host tovarisch Severniy, I looked at his data and they are full of holes.
Since when is the great Vuk so expert that he can declare that the data by one of the pioneers of solar magnetism are full of holes?
Do you really think that tovarisch Severniy would present you with good data at height of the cold war, at beginning of the space age, following the Cuban crisis and the President Kennedy’s assassination ? ? ?
Severny was a personal friend of mine and of my colleagues so you better wash your mouth out with soap. In any event, we have ample evidence that his instrument was capable enough, e.g. http://www.leif.org/EOS/1970SoPh-15-3S.pdf and Bob Howard at Mount Wilson also reported weak fields, e.g. http://www.leif.org/EOS/1969BAAS-Howard.pdf and http://www.leif.org/EOS/1977ARA-Howard-Polar-Fields.pdf This whole matter was thoroughly discussed in the 1970s when I was there in the ‘thick of things’. There was even doubt that the polar fields reversed [as they were so weak and difficult to measure] until Wilcox and Scherrer using my sector polarities from the Earth’s polar regions going back to 1926 showed that the solar polar fields actually did reverse.

134. Carsten Arnholm says:

lgl says:
September 8, 2013 at 8:47 am
Carsten
Actually there is no need. Leif can just repeat the exercise using Neptune instead and then try to explain away the ~12.8 yr variation in its distance to the Sun. (or Uranus with the 14 yr cycle)

Well I did something anyway. It is a bit tricky. Here’s a YouTube video (sorry about the desktop mess in the beginning, please ignore it):
http://youtu.be/TJQTQOdGK-Y
I resurrected my gravity simulator and started a simulation Jan 1, 2013, except I gave Earth the mass of the Sun, so they became a kind of double star pair. Then it proceeds slowly in the beginning, showing how Mercury and Venus is thrown out, as Mars enters an orbit around the “double star”.

135. Carla says:

tallbloke says:
September 8, 2013 at 12:13 pm
Carla: The rate of axial rotation of both Venus and Saturn has dropped by six minutes or more over the last 15 years. Mainstream “scientists are baffled”.
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/09/02/scientists-baffled-to-discover-that-venus-spin-is-slowing-down/

Can only respond what I know.
They say since cycle 10 our suns rotation has been slowing also. (albeit tiny amount) But slowing also.
With respect to cycle 24, solar equatorial rotation is faster this cycle, with a slowing in polar rotation.
Earth follows cycle by speeding up of rotation.
And you said Venus and Saturn axial rotation dropped six minutes in 15 year.
conumdrum indeed

136. tallbloke says:
September 8, 2013 at 11:04 am
Abreu et al have had another paper published …
Abreu points out: “energy considerations clearly show that the planets can not be the direct cause of the solar activity (since this would lead to observable variations in the orbital parameters)” and as we have seen here, those are not observed.

137. george e. smith says:

“””””””…….Paul Westhaver says:
September 7, 2013 at 10:45 pm
Well I guess the science is settled now.
jeeese!
More like, the models and methods they tested against the outputs they measured, showed little cause and effect.
Fred Hoyle went to his grave denying the big bang…….”””””””
Well Carl Sagan went to his grave without collecting so much as one binary digit, of scientific evidence (peer reviewed of course) of ANY sort of life; intelligent or otherwise outside of a shell about +/-20 km or less about mean sea level on planet earth.
Of course anthropogenic insertion of earth life, into regions outside the shell of life, doesn’t count; might even be science fraud.

What would happen if you swapped Jupiter and Mercury?
Is the solar wind at that distance so aggressive it would disperse the gas giant, with the gas then accreting onto the Sun?
How fast would Jupiter have to orbit?
This is not the relativistic version, appropriate with the gravity fields involved, just an estimate, but…
Centrifugal: F = Mj * (v^2)/r
Newton Universal Gravitation: F = (G*Mj*Ms)/(r^2)
Mj = Mass Jupiter, 1.898*10^27 kg
Ms = Mass Sun, 1.989*10^30 kg
G = Gravitation Constant, ~6.674×10^−11 N m^2 kg^-2
r = Mercury orbital distance, 57,910,000 km
v = Orbital speed
Set forces equal, cancel out, match units:
v^2 = (G*Ms)/r
v^2 = (6.674*10^-11 N m^2 kg^-2) * (1/1000 km/m)^2 * 1.989*10^30 kg / (57,910,000 km)
v^2 = 2.292*10^6
v = 540.6 km/sec
2*pi*r = circumference (aka one orbit, revolution)
v / (2*pi*r) = frequency
540.6 km/sec / (2 * 3.14159 * 57,910,000 km)
= 1.486 * 10^-6 rev/sec
Invert for orbital period:
2.059 X 10^6 sec/rev * (1min/60sec) * (1hr/60min) * (1day/24/hr)
= 2.383 days
Wow, that’s fast!
With such a fast-moving influence, the Earth would get an added tiny ripple in the orbital distance, likely lost in the noise.
As to Jupiter itself, wouldn’t it become tidally locked, as solar emissions shape it into a teardrop?
If you swapped Mercury and Jupiter, wouldn’t we soon have the Jupiter Plasma Belt, which would not yield any gravity-based orbital perturbations?

This previous comment now “awaiting moderation” for the first hour. *groan*

140. Carla says:

tallbloke says:
September 8, 2013 at 11:39 am
Carla: I asked this question on my own blog yesterday:
“What if the planets and the Sun were both acting in concert to modulate the shape of the heliospheric current sheet and that affected the levels of Svensmarks Earthbound cosmic rays?”
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2013/09/06/oldbrew-and-tallbloke-why-phi-part-2-the-gas-giant-planets/comment-page-1/#comment-59042

First warp and second warp, start at the corona. Part of which is winding down into the solar southern hemisphere, lately deeper? Which makes a strange looking deeper wave boundary between the inward and outward magnetic field. Separated at the equator.
They call this,
The wide skirt of the bashful ballerina: Hemispheric asymmetry
of the heliospheric magnetic field in the inner and outer heliosphere and I say he’s not bashful at all take a look at the ahh b j coming under that skirt..
Have a look at figure 2. Although the diagram shows where the excesses and deficit of GCR are within the heliosphere. It also shows along the magnetic equator where, ” The regions with the largest gradient in the cosmic ray intensity (in white between the excess and deficit) are approxi-
mately located along the magnetic equator ”at infinity” (see text).
Also shown the celestial and ecliptic equators.””
ANISOTROPY OF TEV COSMIC RAYS AND THE OUTER HELIOSPHERIC BOUNDARIES
P. Desiati
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1301.3144.pdf
Wisconsin IceCube Particle Astrophysics Center (WIPAC)
Department of Astronomy, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI
A. Lazarian
Department of Astronomy, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI
Draft version October 30, 2012

141. lgl says:

Carsten
Cool, thanks.
And Mars starts orbiting the center of mass of the double star and not the center of one of the stars of course.

142. lgl says:
September 8, 2013 at 7:12 am
How clever. Why not use 1 mill. yrs of data, then you can smooth out the 1 yr peak too.
No, the 1 yr peak will not go away, no matter how long the data series is.
But the 292 days ‘noise’ is not gone and you can’t make it go away because Ea Ve and Sun line up every 292 days
And I did recover it, but with exceedingly small amplitude.
Anyway your method is flawed because the planets will interact regardless of what they are orbiting.
My method was just to show that the Earth does not orbit the center-of-mass of Sun+Mercury+Venus [planets inside the orbit of the Earth] as you claimed, because the modulation predicted by you is not there.

143. “Barycentric” influence of the planets on the sun is just statistically insignificant…”
We can rule out Barycentric influence, there are some very interesting planetary/solar timings taking place which I think are very useful.
Uranus appears to be behaving like a giant solar compass, its poles and its equator point directly at the sun during or near almost all of the solar minimums in the sunspot record from 1600-2012.
http://thetempestspark.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/uranus-solar-2.gif
The timing looks like this, which if you have a trained eye it shows a 2way interaction between the sun and the planet Uranus.
http://thetempestspark.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/ssn-1600-2012-uranus.gif

144. Carla: thanks a lot. It’s refreshing to be offered papers with real observations in rather than Comoron and Bluster’s statistical scattergun nonsense:
Blam! Blam! What signals in the data? All gone now. Nothing to see here, move along.
Dullards.

145. Carla says:

From nose to tail cosmic ray propagation. And those misunderstood ACR .. produced by interactions with solar winds, currents sheets, magnetic fields..
we discuss the acceleration
arising from reconnection as a possible origin of the anomalous
cosmic rays measured by Voyagers as well as the origin
cosmic ray excess in the direction of Heliotail
Turbulence, Magnetic Reconnection in Turbulent Fluids and Energetic
Particle Acceleration
A. Lazarian · L. Vlahos · G. Kowal · H. Yan · A. Beresnyak · E. M. de Gouveia Dal
Pino
Abstract
Turbulence is ubiquitous in astrophysics. It radically
changes many astrophysical phenomena, in particular,
the propagation and acceleration of cosmic rays.We present
the modern understanding of compressible magnetohydrodynamic
(MHD) turbulence, in particular its decomposition
into Alfv´en, slow and fast modes, discuss the density structure
of turbulent subsonic and supersonic media, as well as
other relevant regimes of astrophysical turbulence. All this
information is essential for understanding the energetic par-
ticle acceleration that we discuss further in the review. For
instance, we show how fast and slow modes accelerate energetic
particles through the second order Fermi acceleration,
while density fluctuations generate magnetic fields in
pre-shock regions enabling the first order Fermi acceleration
of high energy cosmic rays. Very importantly, however,
the first order Fermi cosmic ray acceleration is also possible
in sites of magnetic reconnection. In the presence of turbulence
this reconnection gets fast and we present numerical
evidence supporting the predictions of the Lazarian & Vishniac
(1999) model of fast reconnection. The efficiency of
this process suggests that magnetic reconnection can release
substantial amounts of energy in short periods of time. As
the particle tracing numerical simulations show that the particles
can be efficiently accelerated during the reconnection,
we argue that the process of magnetic reconnection may be
much more important for particle acceleration than it is currently
accepted. In particular, we discuss the acceleration
arising from reconnection as a possible origin of the anomalous
cosmic rays measured by Voyagers as well as the origin
cosmic ray excess in the direction of Heliotail…
huh what did Sparks just say.

146. lgl says:

Leif
All you have shown is your lack of knowledge. You can’t compare the difference in distance between aphelion and perihelion to the four orders of magnitude smaller offset of the center of mass. Do your exercise with Neptune and you will see I’m right.

147. Carla says:

And isn’t the planetary theory just turbulence or a background noise?

148. Carla: Sparks just said
“Wowee, looka my latest graph. The assumption I’m making means we can rule everything else out!”
The reckless young blood that he is.

149. Werner Brozek says:

Leif Svalgaard says:
September 7, 2013 at 8:53 pm
Werner Brozek says:
September 7, 2013 at 7:17 pm
If there were no planets around the sun, the sun would rotate around its centre, but even if Jupiter were the only planet, the centre of mass would be at the surface of the sun that both would revolve around.
Orbital revolution and axial rotation are two different things and cannot be mixed: http://www.leif.org/EOS/Shirley-MNRAS.pdf

Let me rephrase what I meant. Suppose there are no planets and the sun rotates on its axis and has a certain centre of rotation. In 6 years time, with no planets, it has a slightly different centre since it has moved a bit in the milky way. But if Jupiter is the only planet, then six years later the centre of rotation is about a sun’s diameter away from the case without Jupiter since it takes Jupiter about 12 years to orbit once.

150. Carla says:

And doesn’t a stronger heliocurrent sheet create more resistance (earth slows down) with a weaker heliocurrent sheet less resistance and Earth speeds up?

151. Carla says:
September 8, 2013 at 1:56 pm
And isn’t the planetary theory just turbulence or a background noise?

As Leno Tonti said to the journalist who said he thought Leno’s Moto Guzzi Le Mans was noisy:
“Eez notta noise, itsa Music”
If you look at variances rather than just magnitudes, you can hear the music above the din.

152. Carla says:
September 8, 2013 at 1:59 pm
And doesn’t a stronger heliocurrent sheet create more resistance (earth slows down) with a weaker heliocurrent sheet less resistance and Earth speeds up?

I’ll counter your question with another:
Why do changes in Earth’s length of day track the average motion of the gas giant planets above and below the equatorial plane (and the HCS)?
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/ssb-z-lod-temp.jpg?

September 8, 2013 at 12:52 pm
How fast would Jupiter have to orbit?
v^2 = (G*Ms)/r
= 2.383 days
Wow, that’s fast!

This formula is correct, but there has to be an error somewhere in your calculations. Note that the only variables are the mass of the sun and the distance to the sun. So the mass of the planet makes no difference. So at the orbit of Mercury, Jupiter would go just as fast as Mercury.

154. tallbloke says:
September 8, 2013 at 1:57 pm
Carla: Sparks just said
“Wowee, looka my latest graph. The assumption I’m making means we can rule everything else out!”
The reckless young blood that he is.

LoL I didn’t rule anything out, I’m just saying if the Bary centric interaction between the Sun and the solar systems planetary mass is not a major influence directly on the sun then we shouldn’t dismiss there being no interaction/s between the sun and the planets at all.

155. lgl says:
September 8, 2013 at 1:54 pm
You can’t compare the difference in distance between aphelion and perihelion to the four orders of magnitude smaller offset of the center of mass. Do your exercise with Neptune and you will see I’m right.
The whole issue was whether the Earth ‘orbited’ the solar system barycenter in the way Alexander thought: http://www.leif.org/research/DavidA10.png and it turns out that it does not. All bodies in the solar system are in free fall in their combined gravitational field and feel no forces from the orbital movement. Seen from the Sun [which is where the activity is] it is the barycenter that moves around. No gravitational ‘force’ issues from the barycenter, pulling anything this way or that.
Put a solar companion 200 AU from the Sun. This will place the barycenter at 100 AU from the Sun then try to make the argument that the planets have orbits around that barycenter instead of the Sun.

156. lgl says:

Leif
No the issue was your claim “The Earth+Moon orbits the center of the Sun as do all other planet+moon systems”. It’s wrong.

157. “No evidence for planetary influence on solar activity” by R. H. Cameron and M. Schüssler published in A&A
CONCLUDING REMARKS
“Owing to our lack of understanding of the solar dynamo mechanism, red or white noise are only one of many possible representations of its variability in the period range between 40 and 600 years in the absence of external effects. [. . .] Here we have shown that the test in A2012 does not exclude that the peaks in the range from 40 to 600 years in the planetary forcing are drawn from a distribution of red or white noise.”

– – – – – – – –
It appears to be relatively weak conclusion.
I think that dueling papers on this subject will increase.
John

158. Henry Clark says:

Willis Eschenbach says:
September 8, 2013 at 9:30 am
And the digitized data from those two documents are in my spreadsheet here.
So please … no more babble about sunspots and wheat prices. It’s nonsense, and if you don’t think so, do what I did:
Go look at the actual data …

Like the Menzel graph, the plot in your spreadsheet is in part upside-down relative to how it should be oriented. It is oriented as if more sunspots, warmer times, would be expected to more often correspond to higher wheat prices, but matters are the other way around.
Fewer sunspots, relative cooling, with shorter growing seasons before frost, are what tend to reduce yields and hence increase prices.
That is what Herschel observed and implied. Only in the CAGW-movement era are there commonly lying claims of the opposite, of claiming that more warmth would typically mean lower agricultural yields.
Aside from many other economic factors like technological change, the properly expected relationships are:
Fewer sunspots often higher wheat prices
More sunspots often lower wheat prices
* The Dalton Minimum dip of fewer sunspots corresponds as expected with the time of highest wheat prices.
* A major decrease in wheat prices in the late 19th century onwards does not correspond to solar trends meanwhile, but that is easy to explain by other factors (technological improvement meanwhile).
* The peaks of large spikes in sunspots often, as expected, corresponded in timing to substantial local low points in wheat prices (like in 1778-1779, 1787. and quite a number of other examples). Of course, there were exceptions as well, with meanwhile other influences like the Corn Laws, the Importation Act of 1846, indirect economic effects on non-potato food markets of the Irish Potato Famine (due to a massive outbreak of potato blight disease), etc.
For a partial relationship of solar activity to something as distant as a primarily economic matter, such is somewhat good in context, although naturally not displaying the former as the sole factor influencing the economy. Far stronger demonstrations of solar effect are those with climate more directly in http://s24.postimg.org/rbbws9o85/overview.gif

159. Henry Clark says:

Tiny edit to prior post:
Where “1778-1789, 1787” was written, there is one single-character typo:
That was to be:
“1778-1779, 1787”
[Fixed. -w.]

160. lgl says:
September 8, 2013 at 2:26 pm
No the issue was your claim “The Earth+Moon orbits the center of the Sun as do all other planet+moon systems”. It’s wrong.
As with your admission that your claim was only approximate, so was mine. The best way to see this is to introduce a solar companion at a large distance from the Sun, the planets will still orbit the Sun not the barycenter halfway to the solar companion.

161. Carla says:

tallbloke says:
September 8, 2013 at 2:07 pm
I’ll counter your question with another:
Why do changes in Earth’s length of day track the average motion of the gas giant planets above and below the equatorial plane (and the HCS)?
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/ssb-z-lod-temp.jpg
—-
I don’t know.. because they are all in the same equatorial boat..between the current sheet.

162. Sparks says:
September 8, 2013 at 2:12 pm
LoL I didn’t rule anything out, I’m just saying if the Bary centric interaction between the Sun and the solar systems planetary mass is not a major influence directly on the sun then we shouldn’t dismiss there being no interaction/s between the sun and the planets at all.

One too many negatives in that sentence young man. 😉

163. rgbatduke says:

The whole issue was whether the Earth ‘orbited’ the solar system barycenter in the way Alexander thought: http://www.leif.org/research/DavidA10.png and it turns out that it does not. All bodies in the solar system are in free fall in their combined gravitational field and feel no forces from the orbital movement. Seen from the Sun [which is where the activity is] it is the barycenter that moves around. No gravitational ‘force’ issues from the barycenter, pulling anything this way or that.
Put a solar companion 200 AU from the Sun. This will place the barycenter at 100 AU from the Sun then try to make the argument that the planets have orbits around that barycenter instead of the Sun.

All of the interesting possibilities arise not from “orbiting the barycenter” but from tides. Tides arise because all of the mass of any object in any orbit is not in free fall. This is, as you pointed out, because the center of gravity and center of mass are not the same thing (although I personally think it is easier to think in terms of pseudoforces in the accelerated frame or just by adding up the real forces required to keep e.g. the near side of the earth that is NOT in orbit moving consistently with the point in the earth that IS in orbit).
As both you and others have pointed out, computing the orbit itself in a many body solar system is non-trivial, and things like orbital resonances can stretch out and relax the eccentricity of orbits (with Jupiter being the dominant factor in Earth’s orbital resonances). As pointed out by Willis in-thread and you on other threads, the tidal influence of Jupiter on the surface of the sun is not resolvable on any length scale one might try to use to determine the “surface” of the sun (which has no precise surface, obviously, certainly not precise on a millimeter scale). It is therefore implausible that Jupiter and/or Saturn would have a discernible influence on things like Earth’s climate, at least on the basis of known physics, even before looking for raw correlations in one’s haste to commit post hoc ergo propter hoc.
All that the study above suggests is what is already apparent from the data — we shouldn’t take this seriously enough to try to imagine the new physics needed to support a hypothetical influence, such as the planets deflecting dark matter darkon clouds that only interact with normal matter at core temperatures and pressures, just enough to influence climate a hundred thousand or so years later. That is, perhaps the correlation isn’t immediate, but lagged and smeared over geological time. The data probably doesn’t definitively exclude that kind of stuff, but even if true, who cares? It is and will likely remain almost impossible to prove, and since we lack the detailed knowledge necessary to complete a computational chain, it is of no use to us. Aside from having had a hundred-plus thousand years of internal diffusion to smear out any modulation that might have occurred on a decadal scale.
Now all I have to do is cite this whole thread as yet another refutation of HenryP on another thread, where he is asserting that it is 99.99999% or the like certain to be Saturn (as he claims certain knowledge of what the climate is going to do over the next few years). All without a lick of physics!
Good trick, that.
rgb

164. lgl says:

Leif
That’s not a way at all. The planets only orbit the mass inside their orbit so placing an object at 200 AU is meaningless. The best way is to look at the planets from Saturn and out because they orbit most of the mass of the solar system. Saying they orbit the SSBC is a good approximation. Saying they orbit the center of the Sun is plain wrong.

165. Carla says:
September 8, 2013 at 2:47 pm
tallbloke says:
Why do changes in Earth’s length of day track the average motion of the gas giant planets above and below the equatorial plane (and the HCS)?
http://tallbloke.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/ssb-z-lod-temp.jpg
—-
I don’t know.. because they are all in the same equatorial boat..between the current sheet.

Well, not quite. The Solar is tilted at 7 degrees to the plane the planets (on average) revolve around the Sun in. And those outer planets move around the Sun pretty slowly, spending many years above or below the Solar equatorial plane. Whereas the more rapidly orbiting inner planets complete the loop in a much shorter time.
It”s a good puzzle.

From wbrozek on September 8, 2013 at 2:08 pm:

This formula is correct, but there has to be an error somewhere in your calculations.

Found it. Square root got screwed up and I missed it.
v^2 = 2.292*10^6
v = 1514. km/sec
Oh crud, I screwed up the first time at the end as well. Idiot calculator program with idiot display, cranking through again I get a x10¹, I’m off a decimal point. Should have been 23.83 days.
Ah heck, I should convert the radius to meters to match, works nicer.
r = Mercury orbital distance, 57,910,000 km
= 5.791*10^10m
v^2 = (6.674*10^-11 N m^2 kg^-2) * 1.989*10^30 kg / (5.791*10^10 m)
v^2 = 2.292×10⁹
v = 4.788×10⁴ m/sec
v = 4.788*10¹ km/sec = 47.88 km/sec
2*pi*r = circumference (aka one orbit, revolution)
v / (2*pi*r) = frequency
47.88 km/sec / (2 * 3.14159 * 57,910,000 km)
= 1.316 * 10^-7 rev/sec
Invert for orbital period:
7.600 X 10^6 sec/rev * (1min/60sec) * (1hr/60min) * (1day/24/hr)
=87.96 days

So at the orbit of Mercury, Jupiter would go just as fast as Mercury.

Wikipedia says Mercury’s orbital period is “about 88 Earth days” so now we’re in general agreement.
Good catch, thanks.
(Note to self: Do math when not surrounded by needy cats.)

167. GlynnMhor says:

“… There is no evidence for a planetary influence on solar activity.”
More correct would be to say that “this paper provides no evidence for a planetary influence on solar activity.”
For what it’s worth, characteristic perturbations in the otherwise smooth rate of change in the angular momentum of the Sun, driven by planetary motion, appear to correspond with the known Grand Solar Minima such as the Wolf, Spörer, Maunder, and Dalton, as well as the one we’re entering now.
http://www.landscheidt.info/
Is there a mechanism suggested? No.
Do we know enough about the Sun and its cycles to eliminate the possibility of such an influence? Also no.

168. John Whitman says:
September 8, 2013 at 2:27 pm
“No evidence for planetary influence on solar activity” by R. H. Cameron and M. Schüssler published in A&A
CONCLUDING REMARKS
“Owing to our lack of understanding of the solar dynamo mechanism…

They’re not in a strong position to be proving negatives.
It appears to be relatively weak conclusion.
I think that dueling papers on this subject will increase.

Correct. I know which side’s papers will have more worthwhile observational information in them though. Useing clumsy statistical scatterguns to obliterate signals doesn’t tell anyone anything at all. Except something about the motivation of the authors perhaps.

169. lgl says:
September 8, 2013 at 3:17 pm
That’s not a way at all. The planets only orbit the mass inside their orbit so placing an object at 200 AU is meaningless.
(Sigh), so Jupiter does not orbit the SSBC whose location is not determined by masses inside the orbit of Jupiter…This ‘inside their orbit’ bit is nonsense.

170. Max™ says:

I feel it is worth pointing out that whether anyone agrees with Leif or not about whatever else he may say, he was the first one to point out the inverse-square behavior of gravity in the orbit/center-of-mass discussions.
Gravity is not a force, modeling it as such leads to nonsensical conclusions.
Without a massive body nearby an object will follow the shortest trajectory available through spacetime, which is approximated closely enough by a straight line for our purposes.
In the presence of a massive body the shortest trajectory available is no longer what we would usually consider a straight line, and as Feynman so elegantly explained; this deviation can be more easily understood with a bit of geometry.
If we start by measuring the circumference of a circle around said massive body and calculate what the radius of that circle would be, we can then measure the actual radius (in this hypothetical of course, it is not quite so simple in the real world) and upon doing so we would find that the measured radius is greater than we expected.
If you drew a circle around the planet that intersected your keyboard, for example, you would then discover that the planet is… shall we say… deeper than it would be if Euclid was in charge.
The deviation due to that excess radius, plotted accordingly, shows up as the aforementioned inverse-square law.
When you try to work out orbits on a flat piece of paper by simply drawing lines across it and adding up masses you will not come to the right answers, if you could we would not remember Einstein as having contributed much to physics, would we?
So, long story short, the curvature in the vicinity of the Earth is sufficient for the Moon to remain in orbit at a given distance, the local curvature due to Jupiter is overwhelmed by that from the Sun, yet the Earth does not lose the Moon to either body.
There are locations where the curvature is approximately equal, we call them Lagrange points, but there are only a few solutions involving bodies of nearly equal masses where the L1 point would also be the Barycenter of a system, the simplest case being a spherical body held together by gravity that is not rotating (as rotation deforms the region where the pull of the mass would be balanced into a disc or ring, with a Kerr metric being a maximal solution) which could be approximated by a shell of masses at a given distance from the central point, giving effectively zero net force felt at that location.

171. Fernando says:

well, I read with patience [despite the headache] and I agree with the authors,
I guess Sun Loses 346 10 ^ 9 kg / day.
All very strange. Nothing is constant so the center of mass does not vary periodically with time. If vary.
[i]We Conclude que Considered by the date of the A2012 not provide statistically Significant evidence for an effect of the planets on solar activity.[/i]

172. Ulric Lyons says:

rgbatduke says:
“It is therefore implausible that Jupiter and/or Saturn would have a discernible influence on things like Earth’s climate, at least on the basis of known physics, even before looking for raw correlations in one’s haste to commit post hoc ergo propter hoc.”
By making the correlations first, you’ll have a clearer idea of what the physics can, and cannot be. Starting with a proposed mechanism is a mistake, it limits the search to only bodies relevant to that mechanism, and will miss physical distributions of the bodies that are important for other mechanisms. I’ll give you a key example of what I have found, and regularly make deterministic long range weather forecasts from:
Given the configuration: Jupiter opposite Uranus, both square to Saturn, at any point that the BISECTOR of Earth and Venus is on the Saturn line on EITHER side of the Sun, higher solar activity and warmer weather in most temperate regions due to a positive Arctic Oscillation will commence. At any point that the BISECTOR of Earth and Venus is on the Jupiter-Uranus line on EITHER side of the Sun, solar activity slows and the AO becomes negative. This means the jet stream moves southwards and the weather for the mid-upper latitudes cools, except places where the now more meridional jet causes blocking.
This is the key to forecasting the main deviations from normals through the year. With Saturn opposite Uranus, both square to Jupiter, the “cold” line is towards Jupiter.
The latter example is applicable for this year, and is why it was straightforward that March was very cold, July would be hot (for at least UK/Europe), it would cool mid August, be warm late November, and be very cold Jan+Feb 2014. See what you think the physics may be, it works all the way back through CET just fine.

173. RAF says:

The sun’s behavior can not be explained,let alone predicted, in terms of classical Newtonian physics that disregard electrodynamic and magnetic interactions with its surroundings.

174. Ulric Lyons says:

Jupiter opposite Uranus, both square to Saturn is essentially a double hot signal, and marks some of the hottest clusters of years in the last 100yrs; 2003-06, 1974-76, 1947-49, 1934-35.
The positional logic of the Superior Planets that I have observed expresses how (excuse the upper case):
JUPITER OPPOSITE NEPTUNE IS COLD
JUPITER SQUARE TO NEPTUNE IS HOT
SATURN OPPOSITE URANUS IS COLD
SATURN SQUARE TO URANUS IS HOT
JUPITER OPPOSITE URANUS IS HOT
JUPITER SQUARE TO URANUS IS COLD
SATURN OPPOSITE NEPTUNE IS HOT
SATURN SQUARE TO NEPTUNE IS COLD
THUS SATURN OPPOSITE URANUS, SQUARE TO
JUPITER OPPOSITE NEPTUNE IS FOUR TIMES COLD.
BY INTERCHANGING URANUS AND NEPTUNE
IT BECOMES FOUR TIMES HOT.

175. Ulric Lyons says:

appendix:
(HELIOCENTRIC CONJUNCTIONS)
JUPITER CONJUNCT NEPTUNE IS HOT
JUPITER CONJUNCT URANUS IS COLD
SATURN CONJUNCT URANUS IS HOT
SATURN CONJUNCT NEPTUNE IS COLD

176. Max™ says:

Ok, just to put this into terms more people can understand.
At the distances we’re talking about here, Jupiter’s gravity probably has less of an effect than the ISS has on the Earth… heck, you might have more of a gravitational influence on the Earth than Jupiter does…
I’m figuring the pull from Jupiter felt here is probably somewhere between that from a house and that from a bowling ball but I’m tired and not feeling like cranking out the full math just to have it overlooked anyways.
I can accept that the wobble induced by the rest of the mass of the solar system (which is mostly Jupiter anyways) would distort the evolution of field lines as they migrate through the Sun, I would indeed need very strong evidence to find the idea that it has no influence reasonable, and I would be surprised to learn that a sufficiently powerful simulation of a star with and without jovians showed no variation at all.
Similarly you could certainly calculate the influence the mass of Jupiter has on you or I… assuming you felt like adding enough digits after the zero and ignoring things like passing cars or your waterbed upstairs.
Going so far as to attribute major regime changes in solar behavior to the orientation of insignificant lumps of dusty gas like Saturn and Uranus though?
That is a bit much to swallow.

177. meemoe_uk says:

The (solar) cycle is likely driven by the meridional circulation which in turn is driven by gravity
No it isn’t. Meridional circulation was discredited last summer
everybody read this ? Leif says :
Plasmas cannot sustain electric fields [the charges short out immediately].
now look at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_layer_%28plasma%29
he’d wouldn’t pass his undergrad plasma module if he’s bases his attempt at understanding on his assertion.
Plasma has been known to form double layers and electric fields since the 1920s.
I know you like the frozen magnetic fields concept that alfven invented. He then spent the rest of his life saying this concept is wrong. Its the electric part of electromagnetic which Chapman and you are vehemently opposed to. ( and everyone here knows it )

178. From: http://www.orbitsimulator.com/gravity/articles/ssbarycenter.html
All the planets have this effect on the Sun: http://www.orbitsimulator.com/BA/sbc4.GIF
Everything but Jupiter: http://www.orbitsimulator.com/BA/sbc5.GIF
Minus Jupiter and Saturn: http://www.orbitsimulator.com/BA/sbc6.GIF
Getting rid of Neptune too leaves: http://www.orbitsimulator.com/BA/sbc7.GIF
Zooming in on the Uranus influenced path: http://www.orbitsimulator.com/BA/sbc8.GIF
Getting rid of everything but smaller debris (Earth, Venus, Mars, Mercury, etc) gives this: http://www.orbitsimulator.com/BA/sbc10.GIF
Note the scales there, 1.3 million km, 110k km, <1000 km, the idea that there is significance to be found in the tug that might result from a chance alignment of debris–which again, everything smaller than Jupiter can be filed under "debris" if we're being honest–if we're being charitable then Saturn almost rates a mention, while Jupiter alone swings the Sun through most of a million km by itself, and yet statistically we can't identify a signal resulting from it on these records?

179. Kind of an interesting discussion on this. “In 2012, Astronomy & Astrophysics published a statistical study of the isotopic records of solar activity, in which Abreu et al. claimed that there is evidence of planetary influence on solar activity. ”
The paper seems to have done a fairly good job in pointing out problems with the isotopic records of solar activity. However, it is also not true that the paper proves there is no evidence that solar activity is regulated by movement around the barycenter of the solar system. The study addressed only that evidence brought forth from Abreu et al.
Those who have pointed to a link between changes in solar orbit around the barycenter and changes in climate did successfully predict the reduced activity. This may be a coincident. The failure of Abreu et al may also simply be due to the evidence they used and the methodology. A better proof of the influence of solar movement and the barycenter may be found or the theory may be incorrect.
On a slightly different subject that was raised about what we orbit around. The earth does in fact orbit around a point that is like a barycenter of the solar system for the earth. But this is not the same “barycenter” that the sun rotates around. Basically, for objects widely distributed in orbit, the mathematical point or “barycenter” that the object is in orbit around is relative to it’s position with respect to other objects that exert a gravitational pull. Of course, since the sun holds most of the mass of the solar system, the barycenter for the earth is close to the center of mass of the sun.

180. meemoe_uk says:
September 8, 2013 at 7:53 pm
Meridional circulation was discredited last summer
No, you were confused by a misleading abstract. Here is [from that thread] an explanation:
——-
Leif Svalgaard says:
July 9, 2012 at 11:13 am
An example on how a poorly written abstract can be misleading and confusing:
Date: Mon, 9 Jul 2012 07:05:27 -0700
From: Leif Svalgaard lsvalgaard@gmail.com
To: Tom Duvall duvall@sun.stanford.edu
Tom, in the paper you et al. write [in the abstract]:
“suggesting that the Sun may be a much faster rotator than previously thought”
I find no reference to that in the text, and I find the statement puzzling. ‘Much faster rotator’ means what? Literally read, it might mean that the sun rotates much faster than thought. How much is ‘much’? does the sun rotate twice as fast as 25 days or ten times as fast or what.
Tom Duvall duvall@sun.stanford.edu
to: lsvalgaard@gmail.com
date: Mon, Jul 9, 2012 at 10:52 AM
Leif, My mistake. The statement should have been worded differently. See Shravan’s answer below.
Tom
Tom Duvall duvall@sun.stanford.edu wrote:
Shravan, Do you have an answer to the question? I would enjoy seeing it also.
Tom
Date:Mon, 9 Jul 2012 13:18:54 -0400
From:Shravan Hanasoge
To: Tom Duvall
Certainly – I now realize it’s a bit of a confusing statement because it’s a slightly technical concept. The “rapidity” of solar rotation is defined in our context through the Rossby number: the ratio of convective velocity to the speed of rotation. It is largely thought that the Sun, in the context of Rossby number, is a slow rotator, i.e. that Coriolis forces play a very weak role in influencing convective motions. (which is actually true in the case of granulation; see also Miesch 2005, living reviews). However our results show that the convective motions are substantially weaker than previously thought, which means the Rossby number is very low and convection therefore is strongly influenced by rotation and Coriolis forces (much more so than previously thought).
In that sense, the Sun is “fast rotator”.
Shravan
——-
This had nothing to do with the meridional circulation.
Here is a post on the meridional circulation [which is alive and well]:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/08/29/a-new-understanding-of-the-solar-dynamo-published/
Plasma has been known to form double layers and electric fields since the 1920s.
Double layers occur at the boundary between plasma regions with different plasma properties. A double layer prevents further charge separation from occurring and further build-up of the electric field. The electric field is confined to the thin sheet separating the two plasma regions. Electric fields also occur in magnetic reconnection events, but again are confined to thin sheets or filaments. In a sense the double layers are what prevent large-scale electric fields. The critical parameter is the so-called Debye length. Below that length you can have electric fields, above several Debye-length you cannot.
I know you like the frozen magnetic fields concept that alfven invented.
It is precisely that frozen-in concept that allows the solar wind we observe streaming past the Earth to carry the Sun’s magnetic field out into space, and to ensure that magnetic energy can be transferred to the Earth via geomagnetic storms. Without that frozen-in magnetic field that would not happen.
Its the electric part of electromagnetic which Chapman and you are vehemently opposed to.
Nobody is opposed to those things; they are important for the various instabilities and energy transfers in space plasma [as I was one of the co-discovers of]

Look these clowns who can’t even prosecute functional fundamentals much less proper weightings aren’t going to make ordered mathematical predictive capacity vanish. The orbits of the gas giants and more medium size planets, upon aligning, form gravity force alignment. The sun’s internals, are gas.
“Gravity dont uhfeckt mass if’n yew look real close” like that twit Gavin Schmidt said? (He didn’t say it about gravity he said “If’n yew look REEEELe clowSE it kinda COULD be thair!” about the hotspot that MUST accompany magic gais hype if it had ever been real. If the atmosphere was warming there must by definition be a warm spot near the atmosphere’s lower ‘ceiling’ and of course that alone proves the whole magic gas scam utterly untruthful.
“Gravity don’t ‘feckt it if’n yew dew thuh mayuth raight! Ya’W.”
Something that has the ring of reality based convesation to it sounds like “the internal composition of the sun being gravitationally mobile, the combined weights of several large planets swinging into alighnment, affect the gravitational response to denser, hence more gravitationally sensitive regions within the sun. When large planets swing past the sun, having had the geometry of their combined movement, perform a ‘herding’ or ‘corralling’ effect: all swinging in at speeds which augment the combined process, of affecting the sun, rather than coming together and separating more quickly, as sometimes occurs between certain combinations of bodies in the solar system – the effects are more pronounced, and these forces are extremely simple to know due to the prodigious quantity of space-derived data sent from research & investigation probes…”
If someone said something like that to me I’d perk up a dash and say “No shit? You got the numbers for that I can look at, because I know the effects of gravity are EXTREMELY predictable and well known,
and I know the effects of mass and field force growth and attenuation are the stuff of sophomore science, so I firmly believe you might put together mass agglomerations that affect the sun itself in some way, even if obliquely.”
And indeed that person WOULD have the numbers and would amaze, and mesmerize me, by explaining over twenty minutes, that he could predict the temperature of the earth going both forward, and backward. And he’d do it from some place I know American politics and American media can’t lie, cheat, steal, obfuscate, scam and lie about the know scientific realities: Italy.
This man’s an Italian. Some hick tells you he proved blah, blahBLAH, you say to him, two words:
Nicola Scaffeta.
And screw his illiterate innumerate “I haz phd in climit” clown. You can tell em that too because when they see Nicola say at aboout twenty minutes, “this….BLacK…LINE.”……. and the silence hangs like somebody farted real loud –
you judge
You tell me,
he doesn’t know wtf he just said.
Because I’ll put whoever made that ludicrous claim to task just on this Italian’s word and I assure you he’s no American or English “climatologist.”
He’s an actual no bullshit “check my work” – that’s called a RESPECTABLE
math/physics professional.
“Empirical evidences for a celestial origin of the climate oscillations and its implications.”

iframe=true&width=80%25&height=80%25
You need not fear the ignorant slugs who think looking into a bore hole with a hockey stick generator means magic gas is boiling out bat’s eyes at night from infrared Backerds-isms (Wherever perfesser Bore Hole Backerd is hiding, I know he’s proud of what he’s done for science. Ya’W)
All you have to do is remember there are a few scientists in the world whose work hasn’t been perverted into “act alarmed or you don’t work”.
Nicola Scaffeta. I advise ya to watch it all, ok? Sorry, sorry, sorry to do that to ya but you need to see, this guy’s not bullshootin. He speaks Italian first and his English is bad. For the word “Oscillations” he says, “Eye-soleh-shun” and then when he uses the word, ‘INDUCED” he latinizes it – i mean – look at what he’s doing here, talking physics in another language in SEVERAL sciences –
when he says INDUCED, he says ” In-DEW-said” and past that, you can see what he’s saying.
I guarantee your a&& you’re gonna understand what he’s saying when he shows you “this…BLaCK…LINE.” You WILL understand just wtf he meant when he says that, and the whole room stops breathing for about six beats.
Toward the end Nicola uses the word “heliosphere” or “helio-something” and he latinizes purely saying “AY-Lee-yOhs-phere” so don’t confuse his lack of English mastery with being like an American Scientist: aka a CROOK.
They didn’t have their entire law enforcement system dared to try to prosecute a bunch of climate scam criminals on Al Gore’s word.
Enjoy folks and seriously: this Nicola guy he’s the real effin deal. WATCH the 28 MINUTES.
YOU WILL NOT WANT YOUR HALF HOUR BACK I guarantee you that, my friend. I PROMISE you that.
Bet

182. meemoe_uk says:
September 8, 2013 at 7:53 pm
Its the electric part of electromagnetic which Chapman and you are vehemently opposed to.
Perhaps a short historical note might set you straight:
In the 1960s it was widely debated whether the magnetosphere was ‘open’ or ‘closed’. The Chapman view [going back to 1932] was that the magnetosphere was ‘closed’ and formed a ‘bubble’ in the solar streams. The Alfven and, before him, Birkeland view was that the magnetosphere was ‘open’, i.e. that the solar wind could get access to the Earth via the magnetic field lines extending into the solar wind. Dungey had suggested that in such an ‘open’ configuration, the magnetic field of the Earth and the solar wind would connect and that that would explain how the solar wind got access and how energy was transferred [via the electric field in reconnection] from the wind to the magnetosphere, where it could be released in forms of aurorae and geomagnetic storms.
In the 1967-1968 time frame it was discovered [by Arnold and Fairfield] that when the solar wind magnetic field turned south, geomagnetic activity would pick up and that [by me] when the solar wind was pointing east or west [the most common case], the geomagnetic field in the polar caps of the Earth would vary in a characteristic way. Those observations proved that the magnetosphere was ‘open’ and that Alfven and Birkeland had been correct, and that reconnection was an important astrophysical phenomenon. Note that my discovery of the Svalgaard-Mansurov effect] was very instrumental in this [as I pointed out in a 1968 report], so perhaps you could from now on stop your Chapman nonsense.

183. Willis Eschenbach says:

Henry Clark says:
September 8, 2013 at 2:31 pm

Willis Eschenbach says:
September 8, 2013 at 9:30 am

“And the digitized data from those two documents are in my spreadsheet here.
So please … no more babble about sunspots and wheat prices. It’s nonsense, and if you don’t think so, do what I did:
Go look at the actual data …”

Like the Menzel graph, the plot in your spreadsheet is in part upside-down relative to how it should be oriented. It is oriented as if more sunspots, warmer times, would be expected to more often correspond to higher wheat prices, but matters are the other way around.

The data is “part upside-down relative to how it should be”? My friend, data is just data. It is the way it is, not the way either you or I think it “should be”.
w.

184. I think that’s what you call an “owning”, and maybe this is just me, I think it is probably due to way I learned about physics, but seeing a distinction made between electric and magnetic is strange, as it is just a matter of the right reference frame to moot any such difference entirely.

185. Max™ says:
September 9, 2013 at 2:38 am
I think that’s what you call an “owning”, and maybe this is just me, I think it is probably due to way I learned about physics, but seeing a distinction made between electric and magnetic is strange, as it is just a matter of the right reference frame to moot any such difference entirely.
To a point only: You can always find a reference frame to make an electric field go away, but you cannot find a frame to make a magnetic field go away. In other words: an electric field depends on the observer’s reference frame, but a magnetic field does not.

186. meemoe_uk says:

thanks for the history lesson validating your work magnetic fields in space. But I haven’t questioned your understanding there.
The points I made wrt the solar meridional circulation and electric double layers in plasma, stand.
Until you accept that the key role of electricity in space, e.g. space plasma regularly forms large, sustained electric double layers and associated electric fields, then I have to ascribe your erroneous stance to ‘Chapman nonsense’ and a general overly conservative stance on 20th century models.

187. meemoe_uk says:

You can always find a reference frame to make an electric field go away,
Which frame of reference sets the electric field of a static, isolated charge to zero?
( if you allow accelerating frames then all magnetic fields can be zeroed too. )

188. wayne Job says:

Thinking about all this planetary mechanics and its possible influence on the sun, got me to thinking. It would seem that our sun does not belong to one of the spiral arms of our galaxy, but is a rogue doing laps. Thus it is travelling at a speed of some commensurate value compared to the rotation of our galaxy. That would mean that our planetary system is being dragged by the sun, thus the planets are in eliptical spiral orbits, this would make the speed of the planets some what more than we calculate. The sun dragging all the debris and planets after it must have an effect, that has been ignored. Tidal in nature one would expect from gravity, what other forces are at work seem to be a mystery but the amazing mathematical correlations of our solar system seem to point more to the harmony of the spheres than modern celestial mechanics.

189. …but you cannot find a frame to make a magnetic field go away. ~Leif

The electron rest frame?

It would seem that our sun does not belong to one of the spiral arms of our galaxy, but is a rogue doing laps. Thus it is travelling at a speed of some commensurate value compared to the rotation of our galaxy. That would mean that our planetary system is being dragged by the sun, thus the planets are in eliptical spiral orbits, this would make the speed of the planets some what more than we calculate. ~wayne Job

http://calgary.rasc.ca/howfast.htm
We are moving around 719,000 km/hr (447,000 m/hr) around the Milky Way (roughly towards Vega if you’re curious, though that is just a coincidence) but that motion is in a different plane than the planets orbit in: http://calgary.rasc.ca/images/solar_system_from_galactic_centre.gif
Now, there are stars of the right age following trajectories which would allow the sun to have been formed in the same nursery cloud in this galaxy with a cluster of others, there is no reason whatsoever to think it is not native.

190. Vukcevic: Do you really think that tovarisch Severniy would present you with good data at height of the cold war, at beginning of the space age ……. ? ? ?
Svalgaard Severny was a personal friend of mine and of my colleagues so you better wash your mouth out with soap
We all live with our illusions, fortunatus est unum cum uno perpetuam.

191. johnnnythelowery says:

Dosvadayavitch (Trust but Verify) . Vuk is accusing Severny of a cold-war red-herring slip to our very own Leif. Can’t the data be verified in the spirit of Reagan-Gorbachev ????

192. Dosvadayavitch (or something like that–Trust but verify). Can’t we review the data in the unlikely case a cold war Red Herring was slipped to our Leif by Dr. Severny ala Gorby-Reagan nuke destruction policy of observation. Can’t we check the data without casting doubt over it’s authenticity??

193. Bob Ryan says:

Willis Eschenbach says (9.30am):
Sorry if this is a bit off thread.
Without risking a great invasion of fruit flies I would be interested to read a post from you on the evidence for and against a link between agricultural output and the c.11 year solar cycle. Wheat prices are not ideal because they conflate volume and price level effects and as the quantity of supply rises it is likely the price of wheat would fall and vice-versa. Work done by a doctoral student of mine at the University of Southampton, using harmonic analysis, found a medium strength signal using manorial bread output, battle fatalities and tin mine output (in the latter case since the early medieval period) which corresponded with the quoted sun-spot cycle (data sourced from the Greenwich observatory). The cross correlation is weakly negative relating bread production with battle fatalities and tin output with the inference that good harvests kept men in the fields rather than in battle or in the mines. The presence of a solar effect cannot be inferred statistically as the output of the stannaries dwindled to nothing in the 19th Century about the time that the sun-spot cycle was first proposed but the presence of a 11 year cycle in the earlier data which ran for 800 year is suggestive of a link. It could be spurious of course – one can see cycles and, indeed, correlations wherever you look in historical data but, on the basis of what we found I do not think a link can be quite so readily dismissed. The study reference was Davies, G.M., (1995). Long cycles: with particular reference to Kondratieffs,. PhD Thesis, University of Southampton, Archived. I never pursued the topic as the subject was not central to my research at the time but I have often thought about the study and whether there is an effect. There was no sign of a longer Kondratieff cycle in the data . The research certainly put paid to that – thankfully!

194. The proof is in the predictions and thus far mainstream keeps showing us how much they do not know or understand about the sun based on their predictions.
Leif, as recently as Aug. 06, 2013 said the solar flux for sunspot 24 will average 120 between Aug 06-Dec.31, year 2013. Right now the sun is spotless,or very nearly so and the solar flux reading stands at 96!!
The angular momentum solar theory right or wrong has been and continues to make the best future solar forecast and therefore based on that alone one has to take it seriously and go with it.
Mainstream continues to forecast solar cycle 24 activity much to high.
The first shoe to fall has been mainstream forecasting solar cycle 24 to be much to active the second shoe to fall and even more significant will be the solar /climate connections which should become more evident as this prolonged solar minimum becomes more established and has more years of general sub -solar activity behind it.
As of today I am quite confident this will become the reality.
David Archibald, did a great piece on this web-site about the implications facing the globe from a prolonged solar minimum event.
He rightly points out that Dr. Libby, was the first to predict the solar conditions we presently have (some 40 years ago)and is of the opinion these solar conditions will translate to colder temperatures going forward.

195. meemoe_uk says:
September 9, 2013 at 2:50 am
Until you accept that the key role of electricity in space, e.g. space plasma regularly forms large, sustained electric double layers and associated electric fields
Everything interesting in a plasma happens because of electric currents which are generated by moving the neutral, conducting plasma across magnetic fields. What Alfven pointed out was that whenever speaking about electric fields in space it is important to remember that the electric field depends on the frame of reference in which it is defined. If in one reference frame, R, the electric field is E and the magnetic field is B, the electric field E’ and the magnetic field B’ in another frame R’ are given by E’ = E + VxB and B’ = B, where V is the velocity of R’ relative to R. Thus to speak about an electric field without specifying the frame of reference is meaningless, in particular one can find a V such that the electric field vanishes. These issues are described by Parker is a very accessible form: http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8454.pdf He notes “So one way or another, there is no signiﬁcant persistent large-scale electric ﬁeld in a plasma. One might say that a plasma abhors electric ﬁelds and invariably ﬁnds a means to avoid them.”

196. Salvatore Del Prete says:
September 9, 2013 at 8:13 am
Right now the sun is spotless,or very nearly so and the solar flux reading stands at 96!!
Which is what is to be expected form a weak cycle. During cycle 14 the sunspot number was zero on several days at solar maximum [e.g. in October 1906, followed by 115 a rotation later and preceded by 140 a few months before – such swings are common]. I would not be surprised to see a zero sunspot number tomorrow. This is all so normal.

197. ,
I many in denial of the climatic response to the last two prolonged solar minimum periods,(Maunder Minimum /Dalton Minimum) and do not accept the concept of thresholds, which require a certain degree of magnitude change and duration of time change in the state of solar activity in order for it to exert an influence on the climate.
The period from 1844-2005 should have shown weak to no solar/climate correlations due to the fact solar activity through out that time was in a steady regular 11 year strong sunspot cycle with peaks and lulls which would masked any potential solar/climate correlations.
To clarify there is not one prolonged solar minimum period during that time frame following several years of sub-solar activity in general , to refer to ,to see if prolonged solar minimum conditions do or do not exert an influence on the climate directly and thru secondary means.
In addition I would like alternative explanations to account for the many past abrupt climatic changes(such as all 3 of the Younger Dryas events) the earth has undergone in the past.

198. As we can all see from the diagram solar cycle 24 is tracking much closer to solar cycle 5 ,rather then solar cycle 14.
In addition mainstream said expect a double peak in solar activity.
So far they are off.
Let us see first what the average solar flux reading is between Aug 06,2013-Dec.31,2013 and then go from there.

199. Salvatore Del Prete says:
September 9, 2013 at 9:14 am
As we can all see from the diagram solar cycle 24 is tracking much closer to solar cycle 5 ,rather then solar cycle 14.
As you all can see from http://www.leif.org/Wolf-SSN-for-SC5.png, our knowledge of what SC5 looked like is not very good, so a detailed comparison does not make much sense. Note that the blue curve shows what Rudolf Wolf thought the cycle looked like. The Layman’s Sunspot Number is [avowedly] trying to duplicate Wolf’s method and data.
Let us see first what the average solar flux reading is between Aug 06,2013-Dec.31,2013 and then go from there.
Let us also see what definite number you predict for that average. So far the flux for that period stands at 116.

200. lgl says:

Leif
Here is one proof of my nonsense. Graphs made by Semi.
http://virakkraft.com/AM-Uranus.png
Try to remember this now. The planets orbit all the mass within their orbit, not just some of it (sun).

201. Correction Leif, if you take the solar flux reading from the web-site solen ap index, and add each solar flux reading posted on it from Aug.06-Sep. 08 the total over those 34 days is 3842.1 which comes to an average solar flux reading of 113.0, for that time period. That site agrees with the solarham.com web-site when it comes to solar flux.

202. Example solar ham.com shows average solar flux for aug 114.7 as does solen ap index web-site.

203. solar ap index is the solar terrestrial activity report site. That is the standard which is being used.

204. Salvatore Del Prete says:
September 9, 2013 at 9:40 am
Correction Leif, if you take the solar flux reading from the web-site solen ap index, and add each solar flux reading posted on it from Aug.06-Sep. 08 the total over those 34 days is 3842.1 which comes to an average solar flux reading of 113.0, for that time period.
You get this number because you do not know whereof you speak. What you should average is what the Sun puts out, not what we observe at Earth. Since we during the period in question have been farther away from the Sun than 1 AU, we observe at Earth a lower flux. Correcting for the distance you should have found 115.77.

205. Salvatore Del Prete says:
September 9, 2013 at 9:41 am
Example solar ham.com shows average solar flux for aug 114.7 as does solen ap index web-site.
The correct number is 117.73. The authoritative source is this [where they actually measure the flux] ftp://ftp.geolab.nrcan.gc.ca/data/solar_flux/daily_flux_values/fluxtable.txt The next to the last column is the flux adjusted to 1 AU. You should only use the noon value at 20:00 UT [as there is a slight instrumental variation during the day].

206. I take solar flux as do those web-sites as to what is observed here on earth, which is WHAT MATTERS when it comes to solar/climate connections.. You know very well from reading my PAPERS,that is how I value it, and what I have based my predictions on.
my prediction of 110.0 for average solar flux is for what is observed here on earth.
I could care less about what the sun puts out, it is what we observe here on Earth that matters.

207. Leif, I am going to use solarham.com, and solen ap index web-sites.
They say the correct number is 113.0 that is the number I am going by.

208. Leif is just like AGW theory people which will pick data that makes them look or appear to be correct ,even when being flat out wrong. lol. what else could you say.

209. Salvatore Del Prete says:
September 9, 2013 at 9:51 am
I could care less about what the sun puts out, it is what we observe here on Earth that matters.
Averaged over a year [and that is important as far as the climate is concerned] what the Sun puts out and what the Earth receives are precisely the same. When you talk about solar cycles and compare with the past, what matters is what the sun puts out. From now on until Dec 31, the Earth is approaching the Sun, so the observed flux will be larger than what the Sun puts out, at the end of the year actually 4.5 units higher. What I predict is obviously what the Sun puts out. So, if you want to compare apples with apples, that is what you should compare with. Capice?

210. Salvatore Del Prete says:
September 9, 2013 at 9:54 am
Leif, I am going to use solarham.com, and solen ap index web-sites.
They say the correct number is 113.0 that is the number I am going by.

Well, you should use the number put out by the people actually measuring the flux. But if you insist on solarham, you may be dismayed that they from now on will put out numbers that are increasingly larger than what the sun puts out.

211. Salvatore Del Prete says:
“The period from 1844-2005 should have shown weak to no solar/climate correlations due to the fact solar activity through out that time was in a steady regular 11 year strong sunspot cycle with peaks and lulls which would masked any potential solar/climate correlations.”
Solar cycles 12-14 were weaker, and the period regularly had very low land temperatures in the temperate zone.

I am mildly amazed at the thought we have seen enough sunspot cycles to do comparisons as if they had predicative value, and amused.

213. The sun has been blank for about two days now, has anyone any predictions of when spot activity will resume? http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/assets/img/latest/latest_1024_HMII.jpg
Leif, hypothetically if sun spots do not return what then? and for how long will the sun have to remain spotless before a major solar event is declared, and also ‘hypothetically’ will there be any warnings issued about a cooler period on earth?
Also for the sake of interest, take note of where Uranus and Jupiter are during this blank spell during solar maximum. It suggests a midway point of cycle 24, the end of cycle 24 will be when Jupiter and Uranus are opposite each-other which will be about July 2017.
http://thetempestspark.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/000986.gif

214. James at 48 says:

The quasi-astrologers are not going to like this.

From Sparks on September 9, 2013 at 1:17 pm:

The sun has been blank for about two days now, has anyone any predictions of when spot activity will resume?

Yet the WUWT World Climate Widget is showing a sunspot count of 75. So what are you missing?

September 9, 2013 at 1:44 pm
Yet the WUWT World Climate Widget is showing a sunspot count of 75. So what are you missing?
Yet the sun is blank. Should I not trust my own eyes!!

Daily Sunspot area
YYYY MM DD Total North South
2013 9 5 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 6 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 7 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 8 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 9 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 10 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 11 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 12 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 13 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 14 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 15 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 16 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 17 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 18 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 19 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 20 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 21 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 22 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 23 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 24 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 25 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 26 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 27 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 28 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 29 0.0 0.0 0.0
2013 9 30 0.0 0.0 0.0

218. That aside, by the hammer of Thor the eyecandy from SDO is amazing, wonder if it’s as fun to watch for you folks in the solar sciences as it is for amateur solar-buffs like myself?
I took the large .mov file from here: http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/gallery/main/item/451 and rotated it so I could spread it across my top monitor and man I need a set of awesome science fiction broad-spectrum eyes that could see this stuff themselves.

From Sparks on September 9, 2013 at 1:57 pm:

Yet the sun is blank. Should I not trust my own eyes!!

http://sidc.oma.be/LatestSWData/LatestSWData.php
Guess not. I may have had to look up what is PROBA2, but the latest SWAP image does have sunspots and groups noted on it.

220. Sparks says:
September 9, 2013 at 2:06 pm
Daily Sunspot area
YYYY MM DD Total North South
2013 9 9 0.0 0.0 0.0

The Air Force does not record spots with are less that 10 micro-hemispheres [counts them as 0.0]. This does not mean there are not spots, just that they are small. Today there is ONE tiny spot. Will probably be gone by tomorrow. Having days of zero spots at maximum happen in weak cycles, several times during SC14, and will also happen for this cycle.

221. tallbloke on September 8, 2013 at 3:59 pm

– – – – – – – –
tallbloke,
Hey, good to get a comment interaction with you. It’s been (IIRC) over 2 years.
Viva!
John

From Max™ on September 9, 2013 at 2:11 pm:

That aside, by the hammer of Thor the eyecandy from SDO is amazing, wonder if it’s as fun to watch for you folks in the solar sciences as it is for amateur solar-buffs like myself?

From among those many high-activity image movies, select one that is false-colored red, and one that is green. Set one up on a left monitor, the other a right monitor, no middle monitor BTW.
Put on red/green 3D glasses. Start both playing from the same time simultaneously.
Enjoy.

223. Sparks says:
September 9, 2013 at 1:57 pm
September 9, 2013 at 1:44 pm
Yet the WUWT World Climate Widget is showing a sunspot count of 75. So what are you missing?
Yet the sun is blank. Should I not trust my own eyes!!

Do not adjust your mindset. Leif Svalgaard predicted a solar max of 75 five years ago, and by golly that’s what you’re getting…

224. tallbloke says:
September 9, 2013 at 2:59 pm
The latest output from R.J. Salvador’s planetary-solar model looks very good.
Up to a 0.91 correlation with SIDC Sunspot number from 1749 to now.

Is that with the slightly flawed International Sunspot Numbers?

225. John Whitman says:
September 9, 2013 at 2:54 pm
tallbloke on September 8, 2013 at 3:59 pm
– – – – – – –
Hey, good to get a comment interaction with you. It’s been (IIRC) over 2 years.
Viva!

Salve John, I don’t get much spare time for bantering on WUWT these days. Drop by the talkshop any time.

226. tallbloke says:
September 9, 2013 at 3:05 pm
Do not adjust your mindset. Leif Svalgaard predicted a solar max of 75 five years ago, and by golly that’s what you’re getting…
Not five years ago. Eight years ago.

227. tallbloke says:
September 9, 2013 at 3:05 pm
“Do not adjust your mindset. Leif Svalgaard predicted a solar max of 75 five years ago, and by golly that’s what you’re getting…”
Not five years ago. Eight years ago.
Actually nine years ago as my prediction was made in September 2004 and submitted in October.

228. Leif Svalgaard says:
September 9, 2013 at 3:06 pm
tallbloke says:
September 9, 2013 at 2:59 pm
The latest output from R.J. Salvador’s planetary-solar model looks very good.
Up to a 0.91 correlation with SIDC Sunspot number from 1749 to now.
Is that with the slightly flawed International Sunspot Numbers?

I did alert him to the postwar overcount. I think he might have a small non-linear amplification factor in the model, so he could dial it out quite easily.

229. GlynnMhor says:
230. GlynnMhor says:
September 9, 2013 at 4:41 pm
Is Off-Topic on this thread. Go somewhere else.

231. Ben Darren Hillicoss says:

Leif Svalgaard says:
September 7, 2013 at 8:53 pm
“I presume someone has thought to follow Landscheidt and track what the barycenter path was in Dalton and Maunder and compare its motion then to its motion now?”
It doesn’t matter what it was or is. The barycenter has no influence on anything.
WOW a Closed mind if ever there was one, I quote…”doesn’t matter what it was…”
WOW sounds like evidence is not proof to me…
Lief you have snarkaly berated me before but time will out and (and though I hope not) time will tell.
ps for a supposedly very smart guy you come off like an [trimmed]

232. Ben Darren Hillicoss says:
September 9, 2013 at 7:16 pm
“The barycenter has no influence on anything.”
WOW a Closed mind if ever there was one

Yep, if there were any solar influence it would have to be through tides, torques, various non-gravitational effects tied to the planets. The barycenter has no mass or any other property, just follows the planets around. The paper under discussion shows that a previous claim of planetary periods found in cosmic ray data had overstated the statistical significance of the ‘finding’.

233. rgbatduke says:

To a point only: You can always find a reference frame to make an electric field go away, but you cannot find a frame to make a magnetic field go away. In other words: an electric field depends on the observer’s reference frame, but a magnetic field does not.
I would have said that rather differently. There exist frames where there is a pure electrostatic field and no magnetic field at all, for example the rest frame of any isolated charge. If one boosts to a frame where the charge is now moving, one ends up with both electric and magnetic fields. If one has a frame where there is a pure magnetostatic field — for example, an electrically neutral solenoid at rest — and boost it one ends up again with both electric and magnetic fields.
However, IIRC one cannot boost a pure electrostatic field completely OUT of existence, because (starting with E nonzero and B zero):
$E' = \gamma (E + \beta \times B) - \gamma^2/(1 + \gamma) \beta (\beta\cdot E)$
cannot go to zero, because $\beta < 1$ (and where all E, B and \beta symbols are vectors). Similarly, one cannot transform a pure magnetostatic field away, same argument.
So — rarely, I have to admit — I think you re simply wrong on this one, Leif. Both electric and magnetic fields depend on the observer's reference frame and are mixed by boosts as components of the second rank field strength tensor, and one cannot find any boost that makes a pure electrostatic OR magnetostatic field go away (short of $\beta = 1$, the frame moving at the speed of light).
rgb

234. rgbatduke says:
September 9, 2013 at 9:48 pm
I would have said that rather differently. There exist frames where there is a pure electrostatic field and no magnetic field at all, for example the rest frame of any isolated charge.
The subtle difference is that I was discussing [in the proper context] the situation in a plasma with infinity conductivity [which is a very good approximation for plasmas in space].The moving plasma generates an electric field E = -VxB that in E’ = E + VxB results in E’ = 0.
Gene Parker describes it much better than I can in the limited space of a blog:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8454.pdf He notes “So one way or another, there is no signiﬁcant persistent large-scale electric ﬁeld in a plasma. One might say that a plasma abhors electric ﬁelds and invariably ﬁnds a means to avoid them.” There a no electric fields if you move with the plasma. If the plasma encounters an obstacle [e.g. the Earth] the obstacle will see an electric field -VxB.

235. rgbatduke says:

The subtle difference is that I was discussing [in the proper context] the situation in a plasma with infinity conductivity [which is a very good approximation for plasmas in space].The moving plasma generates an electric field E = -VxB that in E’ = E + VxB results in E’ = 0.
My apologies, then. I missed that aspect of the context. Of course a plasma is a conductor, and conductors in general try to eliminate electric fields, and have dispersion and skin depths and all that. I don’t usually think of then in the context of relativistic frames, though and the way you stated it was very unclear, at least to me.
rgb

236. rgbatduke says:
September 9, 2013 at 10:48 pm
I don’t usually think of them in the context of relativistic frames, though and the way you stated it was very unclear, at least to me.
Yes, I could have been more precise. The context was the ‘Electric Universe’ nonsense that holds that the Universe is criss-crossed by humongous electric currents driving everything, including heating the Sun from the outside. They never specify what are driving those currents or huge electric fields. I was trying to say that in the rest frame of the plasma there can be no electric fields.

237. David Thomson says:
September 8, 2013 at 8:37 am
if our Sun is the child of a supernova, and the inner planets of our solar system have iron cores, then there is no way in hell the Sun could form out of pure hydrogen.
==========
agreed. either the core is made of heavier elements, or neutrons, or there is a mechanism by which stars eject the heavy elements from their cores.
the notion that neutron cores are more common than thought would help explain why the universe doesn’t run out of hydrogen as it ages. the collapse of the heavier elements in the core into neutrons recycles the heavy elements into hydrogen as the neutrons decay.

238. ferd berple says:
September 9, 2013 at 11:33 pm
>i>or there is a mechanism by which stars eject the heavy elements from their cores.
The Universe were born with 75% Hydrogen and 25% Helium, but no heavy elements [like iron]. Heavy stars fuses Hydrogen into Helium and later in their lives into heavier elements like Oxygen, Carbon, and Iron. These stars explode [supernovae] and spread their heavier elements into space which becomes steadily enriched with such [to the tune of about 1% for the gas from which the Sun condensed]. All this is very well-understood in quantitative detail.

239. Leif Svalgaard says:
September 9, 2013 at 10:02 am
Salvatore Del Prete says:
September 9, 2013 at 9:54 am
Leif, I am going to use solarham.com, and solen ap index web-sites.
They say the correct number is 113.0 that is the number I am going by.

Well, you should use the number put out by the people actually measuring the flux. But if you insist on solarham, you may be dismayed that they from now on will put out numbers that are increasingly larger than what the sun puts out.
Whether you use the observed or the 1 AU adjusted flux depends on what your application is. For comparisons of solar output Leif is right, the 1 AU adjusted values must be used. Both solarham and solen.info reports the measured value because that’s what’s relevant to radio amateurs. Of course, those that measure the flux reports both the measured flux and adjusted to 1 AU. Salvatore, as a user of the data it is your responsibility to know when to use one or the other.

240. RACookPE1978 says:

Leif Svalgaard says:
September 9, 2013 at 11:40 pm (replying to)
ferd berple says:
September 9, 2013 at 11:33 pm

or there is a mechanism by which stars eject the heavy elements from their cores?
The Universe were born with 75% Hydrogen and 25% Helium, but no heavy elements [like iron]. Heavy stars fuses Hydrogen into Helium and later in their lives into heavier elements like Oxygen, Carbon, and Iron. These stars explode [supernovae] and spread their heavier elements into space which becomes steadily enriched with such [to the tune of about 1% for the gas from which the Sun condensed].

There are some 10^55 atoms heavier than helium and hydrogen in this solar system alone.
We know that the solar system has been “isolated” with almost no heavy atoms “drifting in” from interstellar space for the past 4.5 billion years, and the continents and land masses have been stable certainly since the stromatolites on my shelf were first growing some 3.5 billion years ago. . If the universe began 13.5 billions years ago (13.5 x 10^9 years ago), and very one of these 10^54 individual atoms came from a string of successive supernovas spewing dust and gas from supernova to supernova to their final rendezvous with the future solar system’s position in the galaxy 5 x 10^9 years ago ….
By this theory, how many successive supenovas were needed to be in exactly the right place to throw their new material into this particular orbit at exactly the right time?
See, any dust or plasma or ion headed the wrong direction from any one of those predesssor supernovas would go elsewhere. It could not under any circumstance head towards the solar system’s future position. ANY dust or gas or plasma or ion headed towards a “normal” sun or dark sun or other planet any time in the intervening 8 billiopn years would be lost to this solar system, because it would “stay there” and NOT ever go back into a supernova to get thrown out again.
We know now that one “ordinary”: supernova happened in about 1053 (when its light reached here from the Crab Nebula. But the gasses from that supernova are still only 5-10 light years away from the source. Dust speeds are non-relativistic, they are not faster than the speed of light. Based on real world “data” from this explosion, the dust from one supernova must itself travel for millions of years just to “perhaps” fall into the next gravity cloud.
Perhaps it is time some one did a “thought experiment” and figured out – not the probability of life occuring on some other planet around some other star, but the probablility of all 10^54 atoms we know are here in this solar system getting here in only 8 billion years.
That’s what? How many supernova’s – that are now invisible! – were used up creating the 10^54 atoms in our solar system in only 8 x 10^8 years?
Where did their black hole remnants go? If we only see one or two supernova’s a year now out of billions of stars, why were there 10^30 supernova per year for billions of years just a while ago in just our little place in the universe?
Hint: If a supernova throws out atoms and ions and dust in a full 4 pi steradians direction, how many atoms are thrown out in exactly the right direction to hit the next supernova in time to go through its explosion and get thrown into exactly the right direction to get thrown into exactly the right direction to get pulled into our solar system’s proto-dust cloud? Now, remember, a single supernova goes through Helium burning, Carbon burning, oxygen burning, neon burning, etc etc etc up until it is creating iron and the heavier metals. All that takes time – or different universe with different physics than we have operating right now.
But any single supernova that throws out a carbon atom that we have now, did NOT get to fuze that carbon atom into higher and heavier elements. Any carbon or oxygen or neon atom we see today means that the iron and nickel and manganese and uranium atom we DO see needs their own predecessor atoms of carbon and helium and oxygen and etc etc. Its not that any given supernova did not throw out many different atoms – obviously they do! But how many are needed to get as many of all of the elements as we actually have in place in the solar system?

241. RACookPE1978 says:
September 10, 2013 at 12:07 am
But how many are needed to get as many of all of the elements as we actually have in place in the solar system?
One supernova actually produces about 10^56 atoms, enough for a hundred solar systems. The current rate is 3 supernova per century which for an age of the Galaxy of 10 billion years would produce 300 million supernova, each with enough for 100 solar systems, so for 30 billion stars. Now, the supernova rate was higher when the Galaxy was young and stars older than the sun have less heavy elements than the sun, so there is enough to go around for all 200 billion stars in our Galaxy.

242. meemoe_uk says:

Everything interesting in a plasma happens because of electric currents which are generated by moving the neutral, conducting plasma across magnetic fields.
That’s an improvement over your saying no electric fields in plasma. But you are still stuck on this idea that magnetic fields are definitely precursory and causal to all electric currents in space. The reality is they cause each other and are inseparable. No electric current = no magnetic field, and vice versa. If you find a frame which sets J to zero, then curl B will be zero too, and so there’s no magnetic field. Any ‘background’ magnetic field is due to an electric current somewhere else.
and I can’t let your mention of ‘magnetic reconnection’ slip by. Magnetic reconnection is a fudge\myth invented by astronomers who never took a module in electromagnetism and who refused to consider electric currents in space science. All sudden rapid change of magnetic field arrangements are due to electric discharge.

243. rgbatduke says:

Yes, I could have been more precise. The context was the ‘Electric Universe’ nonsense that holds that the Universe is criss-crossed by humongous electric currents driving everything, including heating the Sun from the outside. They never specify what are driving those currents or huge electric fields. I was trying to say that in the rest frame of the plasma there can be no electric fields.
Arrgh, not the “iron sun” nonsense! No, no, noooo! I mean Je-hoosis, you’d think that observations of solar neutrino flux, a small mountain of astronomical data (including the entire Hertzsprung-Russell diagram and theory and observations of stellar types), the thermonuclear bomb, a medium sized mountain of nuclear physics theory and data from collider experiments, cosmic abundance of isotopes, observations of the age/distance to/of type I, II and III stars and their abundance of metals (where I do not mean iron) would suffice but I guess not.
Naturally, there are any number of “invisible fairy” explanations for stars that work perfectly well until you get down to the “and then a miracle happened” source of the free energy being dissipated by them. At that point, using our knowledge of the four forces empirically well-supported thus far, the only real players are gravity (for e.g. brown dwarfs and stellar remnants) and fusion. Hell, even the cutoff between brown dwarf and an actual star is pretty much the advent of the mass that enables fusion in the core, IIRC from my relatively few passes teaching astronomy (not astrophysics, although I did love the one astrophysics course I took way back as an undergrad:-).
Besides, if there was an actual electrostatic field running around in the solar system, one would think that it would be observable and long since observed. It’s not like detecting even weak electric fields is particularly difficult.
But sure, in the rest frame of free (as opposed to confined in e.g. a tube) plasma, bare charges are immediately screened and strongly repel, making it very difficult to imagine creating a macroscopic electric field. But magnetohydrodynamics is not my strong suit (partly because it is even more fiendishly difficult than plain old hydrodynamics, which is ALREADY fiendishly difficult in the general case).
rgb

244. I was just going to say to RACookPE1978 that innumeracy is no excuse in this day and age for incredulousness to the point where you will begin talking like one of those thunderbolts cats.
Had you never seen a computer, read an encyclopedia, attended school, or so forth then perhaps it would make sense to be baffled and possibly even fail to grasp how ridiculous all the electric universe nonsense self evidently is.
If you grasp enough to follow an article with even a little technical complexity, then you should be able to unravel the thunderbolt crap within the night if you try.
If you are lured in by the nonsense and the whole “we’re just modern day Galileo-types” they spew, a simple check of how much actual math and science they use compared to vague and broad statements, unsupported conjectures, or flat out nonsensical bunk disguised with long words that look vaguely scientific and impressive to a layman… well, that should be enough.
As Leif said, you’re off by over an order of magnitude on the material ejected by a single supernova, you don’t seem to grasp the mechanism of fusion shells, nor do you seem to have investigated supernova nucleosynthesis beyond a cursory glance and evident dismissal.
If you’re curious about how a star could produce the various metals (anything heavier than Helium is a metal in astronomy) you’re in luck, there is an actual scientist with specific understanding of stellar functioning right here to ask for insight.
I’m sure he wouldn’t mind condensing a bit of what he knows to help clear up some of the issues you have, and you might even find it is enjoyable to admit when you were wrong as long as you work to rectify that situation.

245. meemoe_uk says:
September 10, 2013 at 4:59 am
Any ‘background’ magnetic field is due to an electric current somewhere else.
any electric current is due to a change in the magnetic field or to a conductor [neutral plasma] moving across a magnetic field. I gave you link http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8454.pdf stufy it carefully and learn.
Magnetic reconnection is a fudge\myth invented by astronomers
MR is observed by spacecraft and in the laboratory. E.g. http://www.leif.org/EOS/Yamada10rmp.pdf or http://www.leif.org/EOS/Yamada-Reconnection-2007.pdf
All sudden rapid change of magnetic field arrangements are due to electric discharge.
All electric discharges are due to a rapid change of the magnetic field.
rgbatduke says:
September 10, 2013 at 6:44 am
you’d think that observations of solar neutrino flux, a small mountain of astronomical data (including the entire Hertzsprung-Russell diagram and theory and observations of stellar types), the thermonuclear bomb, a medium sized mountain of nuclear physics theory and data from collider experiments, cosmic abundance of isotopes, observations of the age/distance to/of type I, II and III stars and their abundance of metals (where I do not mean iron) would suffice but I guess not.
As meemoe illustrates, your ‘guess not’ is correct.

246. meemoe_uk says:

The context was the ‘Electric Universe’ nonsense that holds that the Universe is criss-crossed by humongous electric currents driving everything, including heating the Sun from the outside. They never specify what are driving those currents or huge electric fields.
Wrong. I for one have told you before what is driving the currents. Plasmoid fusion reactions. They have been studied in the lab for decades. They are hot enough to fuse matter and propel ion and electrons in opposite directions to great distances. Their unmistakable signature is a high energy bipolar beam, as studied in the lab and as observed in space ; so called astrophysical jets.
The evidence has been sat on your desk for decades, but you can’t ever admit such an amazing phenomena because you’d have to burn half of your books and papers and admit you woz wrong and the electric universe community were right.

247. Yeah, see, this is what I was saying… meemoe, that whole thing you’ve got going there… stop it, ‘kay?

248. meemoe_uk says:
September 10, 2013 at 9:27 am
Wrong. I for one have told you before what is driving the currents. Plasmoid fusion reactions. They have been studied in the lab for decades.
By supplying continuous external electric currents to them. Those reaction do not arise spontaneously. Here you can learn more about astrophysical jets: http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~ryden/ast825/ch13.pdf
The basic mechanism is “Stars form in molecular clouds, where the temperature is T ≈ 10K, and the sound speed is a ≈ 0.3 kms−1. The molecular clouds contain dense cores that are supported by magnetic pressure. As the magnetic ﬁeld slowly diffuses outward, the core collapses to form a rotating protostar, which accretes matter both from an accretion disk and from a roughly spherical infall of gas and dust. When the protostar becomes suﬃciently massive, deuterium burning ignites, and a stellar wind starts to push its way outward. At ﬁrst, the stellar wind is contained by the infalling matter, which has been compared to the lid of a pressure cooker. Eventually, the ram pressure of the stellar wind breaks through the ‘lid’ at its weakest points, the rotational poles of the protostar (where the column depth of accreting matter is smallest). The next stage is a young stellar object, with jets ﬂowing outward along the two rotational poles, and an accretion disk lying in the equator.”

249. Solar cycle 24 lookng weaker and weaker and more an more like solar cycle 5.
While mainstream predictions continue to be off.

250. Sunspot area coverage why it should be used.
If there is one large sunspot equaling say 3 earth’s your sunspot count is 10.
Area coverage large.
If there are three specks counted as sunspots, sunspot count is 30.
Area coverage small.
The above shows how misleading a sunspot count can be.

251. Salvatore Del Prete says:
September 10, 2013 at 9:49 am
Solar cycle 24 lookng weaker and weaker and more an more like solar cycle 5.
As you all can see from http://www.leif.org/Research/Wolf-SSN-for-SC5.png, our knowledge of what SC5 looked like is not very good, so a detailed comparison does not make much sense. Note that the blue curve shows what Rudolf Wolf thought the cycle looked like. The Layman’s Sunspot Number is [avowedly] trying to duplicate Wolf’s method and data.
You are still polluting WUWT without bringing anything to the table. Expect the SSN to drop to zero several times over the maximum just as it did during SC14.

252. Solar cycle 14 is not like solar cycle 24. Completly different circumstances.

253. [Graphical comparison of cycles 10, 12, 13, 14, 16 and 24 (last update September 1, 2013)]

254. The above comes from the solen ap index web-site which shows solar cycle 24 clearly weaker then solar cycles 10,12,13,14, and 16.

255. Leif is going to say it it matching solar cycle 14 only for a period of 1 year or so out of the whole time frame. Other then that weaker.

September 9, 2013 at 2:43 pm
Guess not. I may have had to look up what is PROBA2, but the latest SWAP image does have sunspots and groups noted on it.
Kadaka, the link above was for the The HMI Intensitygram from the SDO, the PROBA2 doesn’t show sunspots, but I do use both to make composites which gives a good view of the suns features magnetic loops etc.. along with Sunspots http://thetempestspark.files.wordpress.com/2013/07/swap-hmi-intensitygram-composite-25-july-2013.jpg
As for any of the official suppliers of Sunspot Numbers, I read awhile back that if you divide the number by 15 you’ll get the approximate number of individual sunspots visible on the solar disk,
So for-example; if we took the WUWT widget Number of 75 and divided it by 15 it will give us 5 individual spots, in this case we can check it with the hmii which today shows 4 tiny specks. These 4 specks as Lief pointed out above “The Air Force does not record spots which are less than 10 micro-hemispheres [counts them as 0.0]. “ which is why these specks do not show up in the sunspot area record, So, if the sunspot area record shows a count of 0.0 and the WUWT shows a count of 75 and the hmii shows less than 5 specks I would define the solar disk as ‘effectively blank’, but that doesn’t mean there are no spots at all on the surface of the sun but only on the solar disk the we record.
Personally I like to use the daily sunspot area record for checking spot numbers. but the sunspot number record is very useful too.

258. As you all can see from http://www.leif.org/research/Wolf-SSN-for-SC5.png, our knowledge of what SC5 looked like is not very good, so a detailed comparison does not make much sense. Note that the blue curve shows what Rudolf Wolf thought the cycle looked like. The Layman’s Sunspot Number is [avowedly] trying to duplicate Wolf’s method and data.

259. Salvatore Del Prete says:
September 10, 2013 at 9:55 am
Sunspot area coverage why it should be used.
As I have shown you repeatedly, on a monthly or yearly basis [which is what matters for climate if the Sun has anything to do it] the area and the count match extremely well.

260. Andyj says:

So what about some young lad who took the solar records and put that wriggly line into a simple DSP program to find the sum of sine waves and they coincided perfectly with most planetary years?
But who am I to argue with scientists lol

261. Bart says:

Those of you arguing about what bodies or barycenters are orbiting about need to define what you mean by “orbit”. The solar system barycenter is simply a reference point whose motion about the galactic core is independent of the local gravitational influences. Bodies “orbit” about it in the sense that they follow trajectories which place them in recurring positions relative to it, but these “orbits” are not Keplerian, i.e., not simple ellipses which obey Kepler’s Laws.
The fundamental misconception at large appears to be that bodies moving with respect to the barycenter will react to centrifugal forces which intuitively would increase as the body experienced its closest approach. But, intuition fails in this case. The bodies are in gravitational “free-fall”. Beyond tidal effects, they feel no gravitational or inertial forces whatsoever.
And, those tidal stresses are so very, very small. It does not appear likely, to me at least, that there is a significant gravitational connection between planetary motion and solar activity. However, this is an entirely different question than whether variations in solar activity are responsible for significant variations in the Earth’s climate.

262. meemoe_uk says:

By supplying continuous external electric currents to them. Those reaction do not arise spontaneously.
I think they could. But conventional cosmologists would never investigate such possibilities due to its highly electrical nature, hence the need for a grass roots EU community to look into it.
I still have my undergrad texts on conventional astronomy, including astrophysical jet models.I got good marks in my astronomy module. Funny that I now reject something I worked so hard on and enjoyed learning. Hence I’ve let myself get rusty.
When I want to learn more about APJs I turn to the EU community rather than old convention cosmology. But thanks for the brief summary your model of there creation. I’ll return the favour.
meemoe model
Start with an isolated asteroid in a galactic scale electric field. This asteroid will pinch a electric current down onto itself and gain mass thru the meemoe proton – anti proton mass creation method. The asteroid grows into a rocky moon which continues to grow into a rocky planet , later with atmosphere, later still a giant planet and finally a star. Net energy output electric discharge induced fusion starts in earnest with arc discharges ( lightning ) on the asteroid, but its only at the star stage and with sufficient galactic current that a star can form a stellar-system scale APJ.
Pretty awesome huh?

263. PJF says:

RACookPE1978 wrote:
By this theory, how many successive supenovas were needed to be in exactly the right place to throw their new material into this particular orbit at exactly the right time?
See, any dust or plasma or ion headed the wrong direction from any one of those predesssor supernovas would go elsewhere. It could not under any circumstance head towards the solar system’s future position.

The basic premise behind your argument is completely wrong. Material doesn’t travel to where stars are waiting to form, stars form where the material already is. Most stars aren’t formed in isolation; they form in large, close groups (hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands) from vast clouds of cold gas and dust.
Most of the resultant star clusters eventually break up because they are only loosely gravitationally bound, and the surviving stars end up on widely distributed, isolated paths (as with our sun, which is believed to have formed in a cluster complete with nearby supernovae).
Just to reemphasise, you’re not in disagreement with the current theory of stellar evolution – you flat out don’t know what that theory is.

From Sparks on September 10, 2013 at 12:30 pm:

Kadaka, the link above was for the The HMI Intensitygram from the SDO, the PROBA2 doesn’t show sunspots, but I do use both to make composites which gives a good view of the suns features magnetic loops etc.. along with Sunspots

http://sidc.oma.be/LatestSWData/LatestSWData.php
Up comes an image of the Sun clearly labeled “PROBA2/SWAP 17nm”, with sunspots and groups marked. Above the image it says “Latest SWAP image with NOAA regions and Catania sunspot groups.” Why are you saying “the PROBA2 doesn’t show sunspots”?

265. PJF says:

meemoe_uk wrote:
Pretty awesome huh?
So, does the Kool-Aid come with net energy output electric discharge induced fusion (if not, why not) – and should you drink it?

266. meemoe_uk says:
September 10, 2013 at 3:09 pm
Such a field would be pretty awesome, indeed, except there isn’t any, and no evidence of any. Astrophysical jets are all over the place in the universe and caused by gravity creating infalling accretion disks around magnetized bodies of many kind from stars to galaxies.

267. RACookPE1978 says:

So, our solar system formed within a cluster, then that the solar system left that cluster. How close did the stars need to be within that cluster to form the elements we know are here in the system, and throw them from star to star as that theory holds? Since the solar system was “functioning” with more-or-less stable orbits for at least 4.5 billion years, and has not been deformed by passing stars for the entire 4.5 billion year period, when did our solar system leave the cluster and at what speed?
again – I am asking Newtonian questions of speed. mass transfer and geometry (what is the probability of a single atom getting thrown through consecutive supernovae without being “trapped” in dust clouds (no reaction), Jupiter-sized planets or below) (no reactions) ordinary stars (fusion, but the elements are trapped in the same star forever), black holes), or simply empty space.) The particles are not relativistic: The Crab Nebula remnants need to be our model of development and shows that interstellar particles are very slowly moving w/r stellar distances. .
Leif (above) noted that supernova’s are said to be ,more rapid then than now because light materials only where formed then, but then we (collectively) need to explain why the presence of heavier elements in the core would slow the initial helium, carbon, oxygen, neon, (etc) burning layers above the core.

268. RACookPE1978 says:
September 10, 2013 at 5:22 pm
Leif (above) noted that supernova’s are said to be ,more rapid then than now because light materials only where formed then, but then we (collectively) need to explain why the presence of heavier elements in the core would slow the initial helium, carbon, oxygen, neon, (etc) burning layers above the core.
The supernova process is well understood. The burning into [and of] the heavier elements are extremely rapid, hours to seconds before the explosion.
The elements are not ‘thrown from star to star’, but simply pollute the general background gas as the supernova cloud expands in all directions.

269. PJF says:

Those of you arguing about what bodies or barycenters are orbiting about need to define what you mean by “orbit”. The solar system barycenter is simply a reference point whose motion about the galactic core is independent of the local gravitational influences. Bodies “orbit” about it in the sense that they follow trajectories which place them in recurring positions relative to it, but these “orbits” are not Keplerian, i.e., not simple ellipses which obey Kepler’s Laws.
Excellent post, Bart. I certainly agree that it is hard to see any mechanism (especially gravitational) by which planetary motion could alter the internal processes of the Sun.
This renders the whole (to borrow from Whoopi Goldberg) “yeah, but it’s not orbit orbit” discussion academic. But it’s still fascinating. I’ve spent hours scouring the web over the last couple of days and have been amazed to not as yet find any definitive description of the orbital dynamics of our solar system.
The solar system barycentre is more than simply a reference point. It is the actual centre-of-mass of all the mass in the solar system, and it is the point about which all the mass in the solar system orbits – but always indirectly (in the same basic sense that the Earth only orbits the Sun indirectly).
Newton demonstrated (and Einstein explained how) that all matter in the universe interacts gravitationally. This means that there are no simple ellipses that obey Kepler’s laws; there are only Keplerian-approximate ellipses that are modified to varying degrees by whole messes of additional gravitational interactions.
I note that Leif and lgl have amended their descriptions with approximation modifiers, so it is only polite to now say that they are approximately wrong and correct. Indeed, in the absence of maths and hefty computing power, approximation is the only sensible arena for discussion.
Will try to be more specific tomorrow.

270. PJF says:

…when did our solar system leave the cluster and at what speed?
We can (almost certainly) never know. The solar system has had 20 bumpy rides around the galaxy since it formed, encountering all sorts of essentially random interactions along the way. We also don’t know how big the original cluster was. We simply cannot work backwards to that degree.
The presence of at least one nearby supernova at the solar formation is inferred by radiation effects on primordial solar system matter (some of which conveniently falls to Earth for examination).
You won’t grasp much by using the Crab remnant as your model. You need to start from the very early universe (which was much smaller and crowded) and work forwards. Then you’ll be able to see the interaction and development of gas clouds and stars (and galaxies), leading to gas-and-dust clouds and stars, and onwards.
Remember, we can observe all this happening around us due to the time-travel nature of our view out into the universe. Observations have led to interesting new ideas, but as yet nothing has been thrown up to challenge the basic stellar evolution model. Not that they tell us about, anyway. 😉

271. PJF says:
September 10, 2013 at 5:47 pm
The solar system barycentre is more than simply a reference point. It is the actual centre-of-mass of all the mass in the solar system, and it is the point about which all the mass in the solar system orbits – but always indirectly (in the same basic sense that the Earth only orbits the Sun indirectly).
The semantics of ‘orbiting’ also plays a role. The International Space Station [ISS] orbits the center of the Earth at a constant altitude above the surface of 415 km, not the barycenter of the Moon and the Earth, or of the Sun and the Earth, or of the solar system barycenter. This is the useful and practical definition of ‘orbits’, But the ISS also orbits the Sun and the Galaxy and many other points depending on what you choose as your reference point. Endless discussions can result from this, but in the end they don’t really matter as all this orbiting is done in a free fall.

272. meemoe_uk says:

Such a [ galactic electric ] field would be pretty awesome, indeed, except there isn’t any, and no evidence of any.
So you’ve been out in your flying saucer to the centre of the galaxy and the edge of the galaxy to position 2 terminals of a volt meter and got a reading of zero?
You sound absurd when you state such speculation so matter of factly.
The plasmoid model of the galactic centre predicts a galactic electric field and circuit – the same electric circuit predicted by Alfven.

273. meemoe_uk says:
September 11, 2013 at 4:27 am
The plasmoid model of the galactic centre predicts a galactic electric field and circuit
No, it does not ‘predict’ such a field. It posits or assumes the field.

274. Prediction implies things like statistically significant results (hey look, on topic), repeatable experiments, falsifiability.
As it is, there are actually ways you can measure tons of things about the universe at a great distance assuming one postulate is true: the principle of mediocrity, which simply says that we are not in an unusual or privileged location, and thus the laws of physics behave here as elsewhere.
If what this nonsense meemoe is pushing were relevant then it would have testable and observable properties from here, it does not, so they’re hoping people will just think “oh, the stuff they’re talking about is far away so we have to take the word of someone anyways, may as well be someone with no clue what they’re talking about” and prey upon the ignorance of those with less understanding of things than they.

275. rgbatduke says:

meemoe model
Start with an isolated asteroid in a galactic scale electric field. This asteroid will pinch a electric current down onto itself and gain mass thru the meemoe proton – anti proton mass creation method. The asteroid grows into a rocky moon which continues to grow into a rocky planet , later with atmosphere, later still a giant planet and finally a star. Net energy output electric discharge induced fusion starts in earnest with arc discharges ( lightning ) on the asteroid, but its only at the star stage and with sufficient galactic current that a star can form a stellar-system scale APJ.
Pretty awesome huh?

Wow, you definitely have a future writing science fiction. I especially like the bit where an asteroid “pinches” an electric current down onto itself and gains mass by producing proton-antiproton pairs. Definitely a Nobel Prize in there somewhere for you, as that violates, well, everything that is known about field theory so far, in so very many ways.
I do have to ask, though — what happens to all of those antiprotons? It seems to me that you have a couple of problems — energy conservation, most notably, since the asteroid in its “pinch” effect through the fifth force mediated by a mixture of darkons and magnetic monopoles that have accumulated gravitationally in the asteroid’s center of gravity has to compress the electric field to where its energy density exceeds 2 GeV/cubic fermi to make the pair production you suggest energetically possible, and that seems a bit high given $\rho = 1/2 \epsilon_0 E^2$ with $\epsilon_0 \approx 10^{-10}$ — although once you’ve make the proton-antiproton pair, you no longer need fusion as an energy source — why screw around with inefficient mass defect fractions when you can get the big kahuna, proton-antiproton anhillation, direct conversion to produce 2 GeV of energy in an instant, the equivalent of hundreds of fusion reactions. It also keeps you from having to get to that pesky point where you can overcome the coulomb repulsion between two normal protons and get them close enough together for long enough that they have some CHANCE of fusing.
That’s the trick, of course — so far the choices seem to be compressing them to a density maybe 1000 to 1000000 times that of ordinary solid hydrogen at high temperature (to get them to ONLY a few hundred fermi apart where fusion is really only likely when they get even closer but occasionally they do bounce so that they get a lot closer) or — my favorite — dumping muons or what the hell, taons into the mix so that you can form muonic molecular hydrogen, which has a bond length around 100 times smaller than the angstrom and gets the nuclei close enough together that fusion through tunneling becomes enabled (even though the nuclei are still really far apart on the length scale of the short range strong nuclear interaction). Maybe while you are making stuff up, you can make up a way for electrons to convert to muons in your pinched electric field inside the heart of stars?
OK, kidding aside. I’m HOPING that your reply was mostly joking and kidding around, but just in case it wasn’t, let me assure you: We could not possibly miss the existence of large, powerful, electrostatic fields zipping around in the solar system. The electric field is the second strongest interaction we know of, only a bit behind the strong nuclear interaction, and electric fields strong enough to do ANY of what you claim happens would turn ordinary matter into not only plasma, but plasma stripped to where all the heavy nuclei are bare, plasma at a temperature I cannot begin to imagine. That the field would also violate Maxwell’s equations is also a certainty, since you are postulating such a field in free space far from any source charges. Your assertion that cosmologists could somehow miss such a phenomenon because they don’t “believe” in it is simply incredible. Nobody could miss the passage of superstrong electrostatic fields (or for that matter, the passage of moderately weak electrostatic fields) through a volume of space, because every single positive and negative free charge in that space would move in a direction that would polarize it to eliminate the field AND the current associated with its passage would be absolutely unmistakable with all sorts of readily observable sequellae.
So you have it backwards. Cosmologists, like all halfway decent scientists, have no prior beliefs that blind them to the possibility of a Nobel Prize winning discovery, even one that upsets many prior belief applecarts. Indeed, they relish the possibility. It’s why they are in the game. Everybody hopes to discover something wild, radical, amazing, that reorganizes our entire physical theory. Verifying existing beliefs is perhaps useful, but ultimately boring (unless the verification is perniciously difficult, a la finding monopoles or Higgs bosons). They are equipped with the best instrumentation money can buy, capable of looking at all wavelengths in the spectrum both near and far. They can look away selectively to the edges of the Universe and look at the nearest star 100% of the time with a dazzling array of eyes that watch it in considerable detail in every dimension and interaction they can think of. They would have to be blind, deaf, and dumb to miss things like cosmological scale electrostatic fields and asteroidal pinch effects and all the iron sun crap. The don’t miss seeing it because they don’t believe in it. They don’t believe in it because they cannot see it — and they should be able to, easily, many times over if it were there.
Just helping you (and everybody else) with that one. It isn’t a giant conspiracy to suppress the actual structure of the Universe. It is a lack of anything like convincing evidence for one hypothesis (one that isn’t even consistent with mere energy conservation, as far as I can tell) while we have an abundance of convincing evidence for an alternative hypothesis, indeed, a complete, consistent model that is understood down to the point where we are working on the details, the stuff that Leif and others are interested in in the solar convective zone.
Sure, there may be surprises, there might even be new physics in there somewhere — who can ever tell? There is currently some evidence for an entire mass-energy layer to the Universe that does not couple (directly, at least) to the electromagnetic field at all, which means that all sorts of things we believe are likely wrong, or only partially correct. That layer is currently literally at the invisible fairy level of research, because it is invisible in the entire electromagnetic spectrum, we can at best infer its existence via its modulation of gravitation (and it isn’t necessarily correct, as there are alternative explanations that we cannot verify or falsify either, yet). But Ockham’s razor — the principle of parsimony in science — suggests that we not create enormously complex speculative theories without a sound basis in direct observational evidence when a simpler, evidence based theory suffices to explain all or most of the observations. Or rather, create them all you like but when they are falsified out of the box by lack of evidence for things they predict that a blind man working in braille could hardly miss, then either drop them or go back to the drawing board.
In this case the drawing board is how these amazing electric fields could be roaming around without sources (Gauss’s Law), without following the usual rules for such fields (WEAKENING in space and time in the absence of sources, as their energy density EXPANDS into space, making the second law of thermodynamics and the Laplace equation both happy), violating the law of mass-energy conservation (again, every interaction with normal matter should REMOVE energy from the field and turn it irreversibly into electromagnetic radiation and heat), without producing readily observable effects anywhere they interact with matter precisely the way we can now observe even very weak magnetic fields (where free magnetic fields are 1/c weaker than equivalently sourced free electric fields). Ordinary matter itself should be observably polarized by any such macroscopic field long, long before it gets strong enough to cause an actual current flow, and the current flow it produces in any conductor would be unmistakable.
rgb

276. meemoe_uk says:

No, it does not ‘predict’ such a field. It posits or assumes the field.
bleh, such a nit picky attempt to devalue the EU model. Leif you are too much. I no longer wonder why a seemily well regarded solar scientist spends 24/7 in the comments of amateur and hobby popular science blogs and forums.
Whats your goal here? If and when a galactic circuit is found and is observed to be exactly how it is in the EU model, are you saying the EU model deserves no credit, while you get the nobel prize for asserting the EU model never predicts anything but instead posits and assumes?

277. I expect there will be a post explaining how you are blind to the truth because you spewed all this stuff which anyone who understands can see invalidates the EU nonsense, but is easily dismissed by one with little to no scientific background.
If I were to make such a post for meemoe, it would be so ironic that it alone would validate every “the universe is full of iron spewing sources” idea anywhere, as that is the only possible way to get that much iron-y goodness in one location, but sadly I think there is no irony in their posts at all. T.T

278. meemoe_uk says:

I do have to ask, though — what happens to all of those antiprotons?
They fall into atomic nuclei where half of them are annihilated in proton anti-proton reactions. The other half react instead with the other common nuclear particle – the neutron, whereby a series of nuclear decays happens to produce an electron. Such reactions have been observed in the lab.
let me assure you: We could not possibly miss the existence of large, powerful, electrostatic fields zipping around in the solar system.
I agree. We haven’t missed it. The Earth for example has a measured electric field of 100 Volts per metre vertically or about 1 mega volt / 10km.
and electric fields strong enough to do ANY of what you claim happens would turn ordinary matter into not only plasma, but plasma stripped to where all the heavy nuclei are bare, plasma at a temperature I cannot begin to imagine.
Yes the energy needed to create anti matter is high. The surrounding matter can get very hot with an electric field and the meemoe matter creation mechanism going on. The amount of matter creation per volume is small, but the sum effect on a planet is large. It’s whats creating all that hot lava a few miles under your feet.
Your assertion that cosmologists could somehow miss such a phenomenon because they don’t “believe” in it is simply incredible.
Electrons aren’t easy to see. They only make them selves known at distance if they react with their medium of travel or are accelerating fast, otherwise they are effectively invisible. Given that old convention cosmologists have invented a plethora of alternate interpretations of electric current signatures ( e.g accelerating electron produce X-rays, but convention says cosmic X-rays are from black holes, e.g. electrons traveling thru galactic gas clouds make them glow this is the cause of the smooth glow of galaxies, but convention says its distant star light heating them. ), and they hate galactic electric currents, its easy to see why they’ve missed them.
And over the decades plenty of scientists haven’t missed it. But when they point it out they are ostracised from the cosmology community. Lucky they are welcome in the plasma, electrical engineering and EU communities.
Cosmologists, like all halfway decent scientists, have no prior beliefs that blind them
lol. I wouldn’t even classify a cosmologist as a scientist. They have very little evidence and too much theory. And as always when someone can’t support a theory with evidence, they substitute in blinding religious zeal, which no outsider is always to question. They base their reputations and income on their books and their unproven assertions.
Been there, studied their books, they gave me a degree, and later I rejected it all.
In this case the drawing board is how these amazing electric fields could be roaming around without sources
Already stated the source on this thread. A sustained plasmoid fusion reaction at the centre of the galaxy. Sounds like you have one over leif in that you still have plenty of creative energy in you which tends to make you more open minded.
Check out Eric Lerner, a student of Hannes Alfven, describing plasmoid fusion reactions and his company’s research.

When I gave this link to leif he dismissed it as ‘nonsense’ without clicking on it.

279. rgbatduke says:

This renders the whole (to borrow from Whoopi Goldberg) “yeah, but it’s not orbit orbit” discussion academic. But it’s still fascinating. I’ve spent hours scouring the web over the last couple of days and have been amazed to not as yet find any definitive description of the orbital dynamics of our solar system.
Well, that depends on what you consider “definitive”. The definitive description has been around since the eighteenth century, and consists of Newton’s Law of gravitation plus the ordinary laws of classical mechanics, period. It is really very simple, and the gross behavior is precisely that observed by Tycho Brahe, codified into empirical laws by his lab rat, Johannes Kepler, and derived in detail by the postulates of Isaac Newton. Because the Sun is so very massive compared to everything else, to first order one can assume that it is fixed and everything else moves (in molecular physics this is part of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation where one solves for electronic states neglecting nuclear countermotion). This is pretty good for the Earth, less good for the gas giants because jupiter has around 1/1000 the mass of the sun so that the center of mass of the two is displaced by a significant distance from the center of gravity of the sun. Even so, Kepler’s laws and orbital mechanics assuming a fixed sun are good enough to explain planetary orbits over a considerable period of time while being slightly in quantitative error, an error that will typically grow in time meaning that one has to do better to do really long term predictions.
Doing better is again easy enough two bodies at a time. There is a trick called “reducing” the variables of the system that allows the two counterrotating orbits around the center of mass to be computed precisely like one normal orbit but with reduced variables (that can then be transformed back into the actual coordinates of the two objects on either side of the center of mass). This gives one an exact solution to all of the pairs, but ignoring the coupling between the planets and the combined effects of the planets on the sun.
To do still better one can treat all of the planets and the sun like particles located at their center of mass/gravity, add up the total instantaneous Newtonian gravitational force between all of the masses, and solve the set of coupled ordinary differential equations numerically for a given set of initial conditions. Now one gets answers that are actually pretty damn good, for the most part, but they are still weakly numerically unstable and small errors in the initial conditions or neglected forces (all those asteroids, all those distant planetoids, even the neighboring stars and/or mean galactic gravitational field) tend to cause the computed orbits to gradually diverge from observed orbits.
One orbit in particular is completely miscomputed in this approach — Mercury’s orbit has a perihelion that precesses around the sun in a way that cannot be explained by Newton’s law of gravitation. It is explained by a general relativistic correction to Newtonian gravity discovered by Einstein, which is one of the primary pieces of evidence that general relativity is plausible and at least approximately correct (although so far inconsistent with quantum theory). A second problem is that the Sun and planets and asteroids and moons and planetoids are not particles, they have a finite physical extent, so that the gravitational force is slightly miscomputed in the particle approximation. The fact that the center of mass DOES have to be in an “orbit” while the rest of the planet is typically NOT in a “free fall” orbit also dynamically couples orbital position to tidal deformations of the solar system objects, which in turn very slightly modifies the gravitational force at second order (now a dynamical response) and incidentally couples rotational angular momentum/energy to orbital angular momentum/energy.
Tidal forces actually exert a nonzero torque on spinning objects due to a lag between the tidal deformation wave and the object creating the tides, and this torque gradually converts rotational angular momentum to orbital angular momentum and not infrequently creates a “tidal lock” on the smaller body over geological time such that it always points the same face towards the larger body. The moon is tidally locked to the Earth, mercury is tidally locked to the sun, in fact most of the moons in the solar system are tidally locked to their primaries.
This does, over time, affect orbits. The moon, for example, gets roughly 3 cm farther away from the Earth every year. We happen to have been born in the era where it is just the right distance away to produce both total and annular eclipses, but the dinosaurs saw a substantially closer moon and consequently larger tides and in the early days of the Earth-Moon system the moon was roughly half the distance away it is today. This in turn alters the coupling of the Earth’s orbit to everything else over time, although again in tiny ways that only grow substantially over time when trying to numerically integrate the coupled ODES of motion. A second consequence of the combined tidal torque of the moon and sun (both exert a substantial tidal pseudoforce, with the Moon’s more important than the still substantial Sun’s) on the Earth is that the Earth’s axis of rotation, tipped relative to the ecliptic of the orbits, precesses around the axis perpendicular to the ecliptic plane every 26,000 years or so.
Finally, a last consequence of the many body interaction that is absent in the case of only two bodies is that there is a very weak second order gravitational attraction back to the “average” plane of planetary orbits, the aforementioned ecliptic plane. This means that in addition to the traditional/obvious planetary orbits IN the plane, planets tend to “bob” very slightly up and down across this plane, meaning that one really does have to solve three dimensional equations of motion in order to compute long term trajectories because this “vertical” motion again very slightly stretches out or shrinks distances compared to the planar projection and adds a vector projective component as well. What this ends up meaning practically is that e.g. the Earth’s orbital plane is very slightly tipped relative to the ecliptic plane (the plane in which the solar system barycenter moves) AND that the tipping angle varies over geological time. These sorts of corrections are known and computable, but are damn difficult to compute and as noted, result in formulae or integrations that are ultimately unstable. You can read a bit of this high end complexity here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ecliptic
where they discuss a few aspects of this, the oblique motion and its coupling to e.g. nutation (precession).
Although this progression does, I think, describe all the major contributers to “orbital motion” in a many body solar system, it is worth mentioning a collective effect called “orbital resonance”:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_resonance
Over time, gravitationally interacting objects in periodic orbits act on one another like coupled oscillators, and the collective effect of tidal forces and straight up gravitational perturbations of the primary solar orbit gradually bring orbits of two bodies orbiting a mutual, much larger body e.g. planets orbiting the sun, into resonance, where the periods tend to be at or close to integer ratios of one another. A number of bodies in the solar system are in orbital resonance, and one consequence of orbital resonance is that after the right modulus of years the planets align (some more frequently than others) which cases gravitational forces acting back both on the Sun and the other planets that on average cancel most of the time to add exerting a comparatively “violent” force for a short period of time while the alignment lasts. Bear in mind that by violent I mean nothing of the sort, that there is nothing special about this and that it arises continuously and gradually in time. One consequence worthy of mention, though, is that planetary orbits over VERY long times have variable eccentricity due to collective effects of orbital resonance — at some points in our geological past the Earth’s orbit was much more nearly circular, where at the moment it is rather elliptical.
It is worth looking at the list of links at the bottom of these articles just to look at the list of NAMED orbital features that arise from stuff like this. Orbits of objects in the solar system are phenomenally complex, which is why we cannot be sure that an asteroid will not be perturbed from its usual orbit into a collision course with the Earth (as happens from time to geological time) or that an object from the Oort cloud or Kuipner belt will not be perturbed to fly in as a comet to accomplish roughly the same thing. The planets themselves are likely sufficiently stable that they’ll still be orbiting when the sun dies, but the smaller bodies, especially in regions where they are dense enough to sometimes come near to one another and where their solar orbital energy is very small (and hence can become comparable to the interaction energy during a close encounter) have a very distinct probability of being knocked awry. Later this year we are supposed to be treated to just such a body appearing as a comet:
http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2013/23aug_marsison/
It has been touted as likely to be very bright indeed, but it might well end up disappointing people as it was less bright than expected in mid-August. We’ll see — it isn’t supposed to be ready for prime Earth viewing for several months yet.
I hope this short discursion on orbital mechanics has been useful. If nothing else, perhaps it can disambiguate the discussion as it makes it clear that the motion of the Sun around the barycenter pictured above is no, per se, the cause of forces acting on the sun, it is the result of gravitational forces acting on the sun in what might be considered to be the “rest inertial reference frame” of the solar system with origin at its center of mass. This isn’t really an inertial reference frame — it orbits the galactic center (approximately) and is itself accelerating, but it is VERY CLOSE to one on the time scale of the motion portrayed. At the end of the day, the point is that even the tidal “force” acting on the sun due to Jupiter (or Jupiter and Saturn together when they are in alignment, or even ALL the larger planets in the solar system when they are in alignment (as quite a number are right now, BTW) are so tiny compared to the gravitational force of the sun at its “surface” that it is very difficult to come up with a causal mechanism whereby it would affect macroscopic solar dynamics. The Earth’s tidal bulge is easy enough to measure, and even the land surface rises and falls inches a day (without most people noticing it, of course) but the Solar tidal bulge is order of a millimeter out of a million kilometers. It doesn’t even HAVE a sharp surface like that of the ocean or the land in which such a tiny effect could be detected; what we perceive as its “surface” is a layer that is probably as thick as the Earth is wide.
We cannot easily detect the energy added to the Earth by the motion of its tidal bulge. I’d say detecting it in the Sun is all but impossible, and the assertion that it not only affects global climate but is the significant predictor of global climate is very difficult indeed to connect to a credible causal mechanism supported by known physics that hasn’t already been falsified a dozen times over by direct observation.
rgb

280. rgbatduke says:

Yes the energy needed to create anti matter is high. The surrounding matter can get very hot with an electric field and the meemoe matter creation mechanism going on. The amount of matter creation per volume is small, but the sum effect on a planet is large. It’s whats creating all that hot lava a few miles under your feet.
Ah, I see. You were serious.
Sigh.
I suppose, if I cared, I’d ask you to actually work through the numbers and explain just where the energy required for pair production comes from. After all, even if the vertical electrostatic field of the Earth were due to a cosmic external electrostatic field (where it is not — for one thing, you might look at Gauss’s Law one day and contemplate the source of the flux) rather than understood processes involving solar energy, magnetism, and atmospheric motion) is 100 V/meter, that is how many orders of magnitude short of the energy density required for pair production of a proton-antiproton pair? Oooo, that’s a lot, isn’t it!
We could then have a lovely discussion of the fermi sea, and how in quantum theory it isn’t sufficient to just have a virtual particle pair in a region of strong fields (say, very near an electron) that modifies its short range value due to vacuum polarization in ways that agree with experiment, to actually get e.g. an electron-positron pair out of the virtual sea of particles to where it can be directly measured requires free energy. You cannot make something from nothing. At the moment, you are asserting that there exist volumes of space with a total mass-energy content E, that suddenly decide to have energy content E + 2 or more GeV. You claim that we can be certain that this is why the Earth is molten inside, although there are more than adequate competing explanations for that in the form of leftover energy from its formation augmented by ordinary fission, at rates that are consistent with the measured concentrations of radionuclides. You fail, of course, to explain why the moon is not molten inside with the same mechanism occurring inside it (or why there is no 100 V/meter electric field near the surface of the atmosphere-free moon) or why there isn’t a 100 V/meter electric field everywhere in free space away from the Earth.
But I just can’t make myself care. Look, a proton-antiproton annihilation event, although complex, is hardly invisible, right? Mesons, electrons, neutrinos with roughly 2 GeV in the CM frame — a signature that any nuclear physicist armed with a photodetector array would find hard to miss and that in fact have to be routinely accounted for in all HEP detectors. Furthermore, in order to be responsible for the phenomena you attribute to them, they would have to occur at an easily detectable rate — you cannot assert that they would be so rare that one could miss them. Detectors like the ones involved in the neutrino experiments would, I think, be completely susceptible to these events, as would countless other detector arrays in active or passive use around the world in nuclear physics. There are experiments DEDICATED to looking for antiprotons, which are rare even in cosmic rays because they require so much free energy to produce.
So you are basically saying that there are shitpiles of INVISIBLE proton-antiproton events occurring pretty much everywhere but somehow not showing up as bursts of neutrons from the consequent disruption of heavy nuclei and all of the other signatures they would produce, in spite of people looking for precisely that sort of thing and hungry for Nobel Prizes. You claim that this is a source of free energy that heats the Earth, but you have yet to tell me what the source for the free energy that creates the proton-antiproton pairs is, so at least so far you are stating “a miracle occurs, and a proton-antiproton pair appears out of nothing” without regard for the humble integral of the flux of the Poynting vector for closed volumes of space for the electromagnetic field (that is, the energy has to flow in from somewhere) and the fact that the only way electromagnetic energy propagates over long distances is as electromagnetic radiation, a.k.a. light, whether you want to view it classically or as photons.
So WHERE ARE THE PHOTONS?
What is the actual source of free energy in whatever the hell it is you are proposing. Not “a miracle happens” or something heuristic like “a kink in the EM field spontaneously forms”, but something involving the known forces of nature, please.
rgb

281. meemoe_uk says:

but you have yet to tell me what the source for the free energy that creates the proton-antiproton pairs is
I’ve told u already, go find it. until u read my previous post to you , no more correspondence.

282. rgbatduke:
At September 11, 2013 at 12:27 pm meemoe_uk says to you

until u read my previous post to you , no more correspondence.

Please do everyone a favour and don’t read his previous posts to you.
Richard

283. rgbatduke says:

Yeah, I’m done here. Flake science is flake science. I should have known when he said asteroids pinch down an electric field to create matter in the first place, nucleating a slow growth process that produces suns. Wow, gotta get me one of them.
I thought he was joking. Seriously.
rgb

284. PJF says:

rgbatduke enquired:
What is the actual source of free energy in whatever the hell it is you are proposing.
I think the solution is provided by the first six words of this Wikipedia article on Electric Universe:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_Universe

285. Tom in Florida says:

rgbatduke,
Thank you so much for taking the time to produce such a detailed explanation of what is wrong with meemoe’s ideas. Although the technicals are way above my pay grade (shitpiles is a measurement that I understand), I do grasp the jist of what you say. For those who may not take the time to read your entire posts, I would like to take the liberty of paraphrasing your impressions of meemoe’s “science”:

286. PJF says:

rgbatduke wrote:
I hope this short discursion on orbital mechanics has been useful.
Very interesting. thank you rgb. I’m reasonably well read from a popular science angle so a lot of that was already floating around the grey matter – but it’s nice to see it condensed.
I noticed back up in the thread someone talking about the solar system barycentre tugging on the sun, and in previous threads other people talking about the SSB causing distortions when it is located within the sun. “Centre of mass” is definitely getting confused with “mass” out there.
Too busy and tired to play much tonight. Will look in tomorrow.

287. Yeah, I tried to explain why the whole center of mass concept being tossed around implies something different on scales such as those we are used to dealing with compared to interplanetary distances.
The solar system doesn’t pivot around a physical center of balance, and you can’t simply add up the masses along a line and then expect there to be a simple point which behaves like balancing a stick with weights on the ends.
Gravity is a geometrical effect, the curvature is complex and dynamic, and a nightmare to calculate for rather simple systems, much less multiple bodies of varied masses.
At least the folks talking about center of mass/SSB influences are still dealing with a reasonably realistic idea about how the universe behaves… unlike the “zomg plasma” folks, unfortunately.

288. meemoe_uk says:
September 11, 2013 at 7:53 am
The Earth for example has a measured electric field of 100 Volts per metre vertically or about 1 mega volt / 10km.
The Earth’s neutral atmosphere has an electric field [maintained by thunderstorms] in the air which is not a conductor and so no plasma.
The links you produce are irrlevant as they describe experiments where there is an external power source applied. The external power produced by mechanical turning a magnetic in a conducting coil [or vice versa], so electricity produced using a magnetic field [the same way as cosmic electric current are produced, e.g. the currents producing aurorae.
To my knowledge the EU people have never predicted anything at all [e.g. how large a field or an effect should be – in hard numbers]. Correct me if I am wrong.

289. I hereby predict that meemoe will try to bring up the nonsense about scaling from lab experiments to different size features of the universe in response to Leif just now.

290. Carla says:

New finding on the interstellar wind direction. Does this change the direction of the interstellar magnetic field and the arrival direction of GCR, ACR and dust into the heliosphere?
Eleven Spacecraft Show Interstellar Wind Changed Direction Over 40 Years
Sept 5, 2013
Like the wind adjusting course in the middle of a storm, scientists have discovered that the particles streaming into the solar system from interstellar space have most likely changed direction over the last 40 years. Such information can help us map out our place within the galaxy surrounding us, and help us understand our place in space.
The results, based on data spanning four decades from 11 different spacecraft, were published in Science on Sept. 5, 2013.
.. The heliosphere is situated near the inside edge of an interstellar cloud and the two move past each other at a velocity of 50,000 miles per hour. This motion creates a wind of neutral interstellar atoms blowing past Earth, of which helium is the easiest to measure.
“Because the sun is moving though this cloud, interstellar atoms penetrate into the solar system,” said Priscilla Frisch, an astrophysicist at the University of Chicago, Ill. and the lead author on the paper. “The charged particles in the interstellar wind don’t do a good job of reaching the inner solar system, but many of the atoms in the wind are neutral. These can penetrate close to Earth and can be measured.”
..The earliest historical data on the interstellar wind comes from the 1970s from the U.S. Department of Defense’s Space Test Program 72-1 and SOLRAD 11B, NASA’s Mariner, and the Soviet Prognoz 6. While instruments have improved since the 1970s, comparing information from several sets of observations helped the researchers gain confidence in results from that early data. The team went on to look at another seven data sets including the Ulysses information from 1990 to 2001, and more recent data from IBEX, as well as four other NASA missions: the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory, or STEREO, the Advanced Composition Explorer, or ACE, the Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer, and the MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging mission, or MESSENGER, currently in orbit around Mercury. The eleventh set of observations came from the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency’s Nuzomi.
“The direction of the wind obtained from the most recent data does not agree with the direction obtained from the earlier measurements, suggesting that the wind itself has changed over time,” said Eric Christian, the IBEX mission scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “It’s an intriguing result, which relied on looking at a suite of data measured in a bunch of different ways.”
http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/interstellar-wind-changed-direction-over-40-years/

291. Carla says:
September 12, 2013 at 4:11 pm
New finding on the interstellar wind direction. Does this change the direction of the interstellar magnetic field and the arrival direction of GCR, ACR and dust into the heliosphere?
The neutral atoms and dust are not influenced by the magnetic field so the change of direction [which is small to begin with] is not important for them, and the charged particles are overwhelmed by the solar wind so, again, there is not much effect there.

292. On Magnetic Reconnection:
http://www.leif.org/EOS/PTO000012-Solar-Reconnection.pdf
“Magnetic ﬁeld lines are theoretical constructs, but in the Sun’s corona they can be considered to have a physical reality. The plasma in the corona is an excellent conductor of electricity. In such an environment, an electric ﬁeld would immediately be neutralized by electric currents. That means the magnetic ﬁeld lines cannot move with respect to the underlying plasma—if they did, the
changing magnetic ﬁeld would generate an electric ﬁeld…Magnetic reconnection, therefore, requires the solar plasma to temporarily deviate from the inﬁnitely conducting ideal. When oppositely directed ﬁeld regions get pushed together, the changing magnetic ﬂux generates a
sheet of electric current. A strong enough current taxes the plasma’s ability to conduct electricity,
which allows an electric ﬁeld to build up and the magnetic ﬁeld lines to move through the plasma and reconnect. At the same time, it produces heat by ohmic dissipation. The newly reconnected ﬁeld lines are then free to lower their energy by snapping back from the reconnection region, converting magnetic energy into heat and bulk kinetic energy…