JimP
Some more thoughts on this barycentric approach. The barycenter is the point around which our solar system rotates. You may know better than me how is it measured, but I would assume that gravitational cycles of the planets – as demonstrated by your Jupiter-Saturn data – are primary variables for its radius. Do you believe this is so?

It is intriguing that the ~178.5 year barycentric cycle is so exact, as illustrated by the close alignment of chart data over three cycles in your most recent post. Why do you think the period shifts from 178.1 to 178.9 years?

I can’t imagine what influences the barycenter except the planets, but the planets don’t follow a 179 year pattern. Do you think this cycle could be a small sub-wave of a very big temporal wave pattern in the barycenter, with the sun responding to regular harmonic gyroscopic periods of its detrita – remembering the sun is 99.8% of the mass of the solar system?

Your Jupiter-Saturn barycenter chart can be augmented to show the Jupiter perihelion and aphelion. One by one, you could add all planetary relations – eg Jupiter Uranus, etc, to see if they have a regular pattern influencing dates of stationary points and sunspots in the way Jupiter-Saturn does. Maybe the 20 year Jupiter-Saturn cycle is just an exact 1/9 fraction of the 180 year barycentric period? Even so this still looks more like causation than correlation. You could build quite a jeweled necklace for the solar system! Maybe the Jupiter-Saturn period is shepherding the barycenter and sunspots? (ie on the same model as how Saturn’s shepherd moons Prometheus and Pandora keep the F ring in place - http://csep10.phys.utk.edu/astr161/l...urn/moons.html .)

I assume in these latest charts the dates are for convenience, so where it says ‘1632’ it should really say ‘1632/1811/1990’?

Could you explain the meaning of the variables – torque, radius, angular momentum, longitude? How do you interpret each of these findings?

Your OP term R^2 is explained at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coeffic..._determination . It is worth trying to explain statistical terms in a simple way to engage more readers. How does statistics interpret the R^2 figure you derived from the perihelion correlation, and do you see regression as the best/only statistical approach for this data?

RT