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Old 03-March-2008, 12:44 AM
Robert Tulip Robert Tulip is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2006
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I just think you are overlooking that correlation is not causation. Jupiter's orbital period and sunspot cycles are both about 12 years so they naturally correlate over periods up to several hundred years. You show that Jupiter gets to aphelion at sunspot peaks, using data from 40 cycles. The two cycles obviously line up for much of this time, but this data period is far too short to suggest any causal effect. I imagine that if we had sunspot data from say 5000 years ago we might well find the peak was at Jupiter's perihelion for 500 years or so. I could not find on the internet the rate of precession of Jupiter's orbit, but this would help indicate whether your result is of more interest.