“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
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.
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.
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] .
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.
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.
Leif Svalgaard says:
September 8, 2013 at 6:25 am
Expanding to 500 years I get http://www.leif.org/research/Barycenter12.png Now the ‘noise’ is gone
Or just become smaller. Under magnification there is still a little blip.
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 !
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.
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.
“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.
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 ? ? ?
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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)
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 …
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.
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)
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.
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.
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/
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..
Carla: If you don’t want to have to give awkward answers, keep ’em asking the wrong questions.