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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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 — 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.
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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

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.
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Small correction, Mercury is not tidally locked, it was expected to be but instead it has a longer day than year, something like 176~ and 88 days respectively.
Oh, and we do have ways of examining the magnetic field strength within the galaxy: http://www.mpa-garching.mpg.de/mpa/institute/news_archives/news1112_fara/news1112_fara-en.html