“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 solar activity.
Source: http://phys.org/news/2013-09-evidence-planetary-solar.html#nwlt
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
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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
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”:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some news about powerful astrophysical jets:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/09/130905142709.htm
“Processes in the disk tap the tremendous gravitational energy of the black hole to propel material outward from the poles of the disk”
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/
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.
Yeah, it says the inflow varied by 4 to 9 degrees, which is around half to one box width on the image they had: http://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/ibex_constellations.jpg?itok=QcJ_CdSh
So we might be talking about a difference of being near Scorpio to about the current position at the edges of Oph, 8 to 18 moon-widths or so.
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…