Thread: Jupiter influencing sunspots
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Old 22-March-2008, 05:07 PM
JimP JimP is offline
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Originally Posted by tusenfem View Post
You can probably find papers where there is a similar correlation between two things, but unless you can come up with a reasonable explanation as to WHY the correlation should exist. There is a very interesting WIKI page on spurious relationship / spurious correlation.
I did some more reading on the WIKI page and they give a very simple example for determining if two similar cycles are a correlation or a spurious relationship. So I looked at all of the sunspot minimum dates comparing them to the peaks in angular momentum. Nothing conclusive. Some amazingly high coincidences.

I used the overall maximum and minimum range of the torque cycle. 22 out of the 36 occurred within the 10% distance range and 12 out of the 36 fell within the 5% distance range.


There are exceptions and inconsistencies so I went back to look at the individual Jovian cycles. This time the numbers were run for each individual sunspot cycle and graphed. All most all of the cycles came up with very high r^2 numbers. I did come up with some glaring exceptions. What I concluded is that in the case of Jupiter influencing sunspots is that what we are most likely seeing is the transition of Jupiter’s 11.826 year cycle and the sunspots average 10.5 year cycle.

When looking at the Jovian cycle broken down into individual sunspot cycles, the hypothesis that Jupiter is influencing the sunspot cycle breaks down and does not pass the simple test for spurious relationships. There exit sunspot cycles with negative slopes when compared to Jupiter’s distance from the Sun. Therefore, when just the Jovian cycle and just the sunspot cycle are compared, then a spurious relationship is found to exist. “Correlation” and “spurious correlation” are statistical terms and the relationship between the two cycles needs to be tested statistically. I did not know how to do this at the beginning. Analogies do not cut it. I’ve learned a lot from this exercise.




One last chart. I compared the time between 17 sunspot cycle minimum dates vs. 23 angular momentum cycle peak dates. Some very interesting patterns.