From 7th May I will be away until well after 10th May when this thread will automatically close. So this is a closing remark by me.

Firstly, I thank all those that took part in the discussions, your questions and discussions are useful in helping to arrive at the truth. I will try to put things a little differently here so as to highlight the important points.

1. It has been observed that sunspots show a number of different periods, not just the 11 and 22 year cycles, and that many of the periods found have associations with planetary periods, particularly the periods between conjunctions, also known as synodic periods.

2. In the past a number of different mechanisms have been proposed as possible explanations for those findings. Each of these has had a partial success so that no one proposal has been widely accepted by the scientific community.

3. The proposal put forward in this thread is a new one - put forward by me first around 1989 and updated soon after. The relevance of the proposal may be broken into three parts ...

4. Under GR the effect of gravity on horizontal radiation is double what it is in Newtonian gravity. That means that radiation constrained inside the Sun for long periods in the core is affected by the planets (especially the giant planets) and causes an acceleration of the core that is greater than the acceleration of the outer layers. This leads to weak internal convection in the N-S direction as the Sun moves N or S of the barycentre as seen in solar equatorial co-ordinates.

There is uncertainty as to whether the constant of 5/3 should be a slightly different value (such as 3^0.5 = 1.732). There is also uncertainty whether the exact same affect applies to the relativistic mass component of ordinary matter also. These things need to be resolved, but do not in any way mean that there is no effect.

5. The weakest link in the chain of events is that this proposal will not work accurately unless it is also the case that there is a natural solar oscillation with period 10.5 years and high Q factor. This idea is suggested because it is found that periods near to 10.5 years are stronger in the sunspot signal than in the absolute N-S barycentre motion whereas periods far from that are much weaker in the sunspots.

6. When the assumption in 5 is made, it is possible to make an oscillator that does perform in a similar manner to the observed sunspots, having a correlation coefficient of 0.66 which indicates that the method is sound. The method should adequately explain periods such as the Maunder minimum, because they result from the solar barycentre motion being at near 180 degree phase from the long Q oscillator, and so bringing it to near zero. That will of course be an uncommon event but bound to happen from time to time.

It also explains why long term solar system cycles (near exact repeats of the 4 gas giants) of 2300 and 4600 years are also found in the climate record.

7. Hopefully some solar physicist will decide to try this proposal out in their models to see if it improves the results. In such case I would suggest that although the N-S motion is most important, the motion within the solar equatorial plane is also worth including.

Regards
Ray Tomes