Never base an assumption by comparison.

I can cause you to wobble too, but that doesn't mean I cause your pimples.

What causes our sun to wobble then?

The gravitational tug from the planets.

What causes SunSpots?

I don't know.

Ahh see...
We need to know that.

I looked at your work, charts and graphs.
My point is not that I am saying you are wrong- I am saying that we need a lot more information before basing conclusions.

You seem to be asking "Could this be it?"
And that is GREAT

But don't feel persecuted or like people are "closed to the idea."

That is not the case. Maybe there is a correlation. Maybe there is not.
By asking you to prove your claim- You are given the opportunity to make a discovery- or learn that you went down the wrong path.

It isn't that people just don't want to believe it. It's that we want proof. You Could be right there is a correlation- that's no problem. You just need to convince us so.

In my opinion "wobble" is a poor choice of a word. It is orbital motion, nothing more and nothing less.

The gravitational action of the planets causes the Sun to move in a complex looping path that sometimes carries it upwards of half a million miles from the barycenter, but as I pointed out earlier, the Sun "feels" nothing but a vanishingly small amount of tidal action. It is the nature of the rather gentle gravitational beast. I would be flabbergasted if this is enough to affect the electrodynamics of its innards significantly, and so far no one has offered a plausible effect from anything else related to the planets.

I agree

I’m working on that. I’ll never be able to provide a proof—but maybe some good circumstantial evidence. I came here looking for constructive criticism. I just could not believe the high r^2 values I was getting.

That's fine, It was your posts asking "Is it so far fetched that....?!" that inspired my response

I think saying the sun wobbles is a correct term; NASA can look at a star and see how much it wobbles and calculate the mass of the planet causing the wobble and by measuring the time of one complete wobble using Kepler’s Laws you can tell how far the planet is from the star.

Hornblower’s gravitational action is probably a better definition of what is happening; but the term wobble is what is used a lot.

Your view of the sunspot data (in my opinion) is not measuring wobble, it is measuring the correlation of Jupiter’s distance from the sun against the number of sunspots “we see” on earth. In that last sentence the difference between your view and my view is what I have in quotes “we see”. The difference is I’m allowing two paths to follow: 1) Jupiter is part of the causal system of sunspots and 2) Jupiter is not part of the causal system but affects our ability to count sunspots. In your OP and other posts you would look only at 1) Jupiter is part of the causal system.

As I explained to Hornblower the high r^2 value you are seeing is coming from the data being averaged twice and the pieces of data being averaged are quite large; this has the effect of really smoothing the data out and again in my opinion tends to rule Jupiter out as part of the causal system. If you were to take only one solar cycle and do your correlation again using a smaller time frame my guess would be the correlation wouldn’t be all that great. If your correlation was high then looking for a cause system would be the thing to do.

Does that mean that your high r^2 number doesn’t mean anything? Not at all; it means that when you remove a lot of noise from the data Jupiter stands out as having some type of effect on how many sunspots we see.
I don’t know if you a familiar with the Maunder Minimum that happened back about 1645, but there was a 70 year period where we had no sunspots (or very few). I am fairly certain Jupiter was still orbiting the sun; but no sunspots. If you study sunspots this is one of the greatest mysteries that really has never been solved. How could it happen?

Using your Alcyone Ephemeris 3.2 software look at where the planets were in the 1640 to 1650 timeframe. If you take the time to do this I think you will begin to see the value of your work.


Now using your Alcyone software look at the planet alignment for 2018 to 2022. Does it look familiar?

NASA’s sunspot expert is Dr. David Hathaway; try Googling:
“nasa hathaway cycle 25” (no quotes)

He is predicting cycle 25 to be one of the weakest in history (history meaning from cycle 1 to cycle 24). Also note he is predicting cycle 24 to be strong; there has been much discussion on this site about cycle 24 being weak, but Hathaway and other solar experts don’t see it that way.

The real question is what is the mechanism behind the weak and strong solar cycles? In my opinion (this is where your data helps) it is the conservation of angular momentum of the planets causing one of the sun’s poles to tilt towards the earth; this affects the number of sunspots we see.
For this to happen the sun and planets have to be a system in the strictest sense and the sun has to work like a gyroscope (the outer spins much faster than the interior).

If you’re not that familiar with actions and reactions of a gyroscope here is a youtube video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCcfKBfmyP4
This movie is about 5 minutes long and the first 3 minutes are pretty boring but at about 3 minutes and 50 seconds in he starts to show how the gyroscope reacts when you apply pressure to the aft gimbal (the outer gimbal). Notice that applying very little pressure causes the spinning pole of the gyroscope to drop. Picture this as the sun and the pole of the sun drops from the top to where the equator was; the sunspots from earth’s view wouldn’t be visible. But even worse since the pole of the sun is facing the earth the sun’s main flow of heat and radiation will not be flowing towards the earth; it’s going to get colder. (Read about the Maunder Minimum).

This can’t happen to the sun can it? Well, the way I read your chart is: yes it can and does! And the thing to remember is Jupiter is only providing 60 percent of our solar systems angular momentum, throw in Saturn and it goes up to 85 percent.

Jim

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I don’t believe that I have averaged any data twice. Which graph are you referring to?

Thank you for your input. It gives me a lot to think about. My comment about the Suns wobble came from your web site.

I looked at the top 4 ½ % of the months with the highest sunspots.




But after looking at the range of the months I realized that 56% of them were in the last 70 years out of a range of 259 years. So I am sure that this is affecting my data some if not a lot.

I took the 140 records and sorted them by year. Then I deleted out the duplicate years. This gave me unique years where the monthly sunspot number was in the top 4 ½ %.
This is my list.



Then I marked the location of the peak years on my “The Solar Systems Torque” graph. If there were consecutive years with high sunspot numbers I only used one arrow. All of the arrows were close enough to the aphelion and perihelion that this bears further analysis.

The six points on the positive side of the graph only vary by 14 % of the total range. And I guess that would mean that if you took there average, none of the 6 points would vary more than 7% from the average. That’s not a bad coincidence is it? I will double check my work.

I was referring to your first post.
On your chart you have 18 pieces of data plotted for 1 orbit of Jupiter.
I think this is 36 points equally spaced around Jupiter’s orbit and each point contains two pieces of data, one going away from the sun and one coming back. Each of these points contain approximately 4 months of data averaged together.
But this would be only for one orbit of Jupiter; but you have 21 or 22 orbits of Jupiter worth of data that I think you used. To get this data into the plot it must have somehow been combined. It could have been averaged or totaled (but the numbers aren’t big enough for totaling) so I assumed you averaged them.

All and all I liked the chart, I found it very interesting.

Jim

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I exported the data to a database and did my totals and averaging. Then I brought it back into Excel and graphed it. I should have defined the ave_ss with a decimal. The r^2 would have gone up slightly. My process doesn’t distinguish between Jupiter coming or going. I just looked at distances.

Below is my spreadsheet data for the 8 month period.

That motion that he induced with his finger did not simulate the torque which the planets exert on the presumably slightly oblate Sun. The way to simulate the latter would be to set the axis a few degrees off vertical and hang a small weight on the gymbal under the lower gyro bearing. That would attempt to move the axis tilt toward the vertical, and as a result the gyro would precess slowly and steadily in a conical pattern around the vertical coordinate.

The fact that Jupiter and Saturn have about 85% of the total angular momentum of the solar system, and the Sun's spin accounts for only about 2%, is beside the point. That tells us nothing about the magnitude and direction of the gravitational torque the planets exert on the Sun.

Please show us geometrically and dynamically, in a few simple steps, what it is you think I am missing.

Hanging a weight off the near gimbal would be using gravity and there is one thing you and I agree on and that is in no way can a planet’s gravity exert enough force on the sun to really cause any sizable effect. As I said before what I believe is moving it is the process of the conservation of angular momentum.

If Jupiter and Saturn were connected directly to the sun like the arms extended of an ice-skater starting a spin then when that skater brings their arms in to their side their spinning speed increases. This is the effect of the conservation of angular momentum. There are (at least) two problems with this analogy compared to the sun. The first is the planets aren’t connected to sun like the arms on a skater, but in the model on my website I show how they are connected. The second problem is the sun is so massive that the planets (even if they were connected) wouldn’t be able to speed it up like the skater moving their arms in. The question is what happens to the surplus of angular momentum? The planets are moving close to the equator of the sun and excess angular momentum will push in the direction like the guy pushing on the gyroscope and this pushing force could cause a shift in the poles of the sun.

If you looked at the model I presented it shows what you are asking for and more. The problem is this model is different than your gravity based model and provides a structure that combines the planets into a more connected system than any model that is gravity based only (that I’ve seen). The model I presented is capable of modeling all of the strangeness of the solar dynamo, but on its own does not help with the explanation of the Maunder Minimum. This model needs to separate into two causal systems one for the normal sunspot cycle and the other for special events like the Maunder Minimum. And the physics is there to do this if the model has enough structure to convert excess angular momentum and convert it into tilt. It is the structure and how much more the planets are connected than just being held in place by gravity.

I doubt that the above paragraph is going to satisfy you and I would love to discuss it further but I don’t think doing it on JimP’s thread is the appropriate place to do it. If you want to discuss it further let me know and I will start a thread.

Jim

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You chose to introduce your arguments into this thread. As long as JimP and the mods do not object, I will keep it right here.

The sudden change of the gyro's orientation was not caused by conservation of angular momentum. It was caused by a push from the guy's finger, which you clearly acknowledged. That force caused a redistribution of the gyro's angular momentum and that of Planet Earth, and in accordance with the law of conservation the vector sum of these components remained unchanged.

The Sun and the planets have two angular momentum components each, specifically an orbital and a spin component. If an interaction among these bodies causes a change in the orientation of the Sun's spin axis, that same interaction will cause a net opposite change among the other components and the resultant will be unchanged. That is what conservation of angular momentum is all about. It is part of a description of the properties of the reaction to a force, not the source of that force.

You appear to be arguing that some sort of interactive force could suddenly tip the Sun's spin axis about 90 degrees, cause it to remain pointed at the Earth for about 70 years, and then return it to its familiar position. If that force is not gravitational, then what is it, and how can it be intense enough to cause this action?

Please do not merely refer me back to your site. I looked and it was no help at all. I would prefer to see you try again to show us right here a concise statement of what it is that you think I am missing.

As for the Maunder minimum, I do not in principle see a temporary absence of sunspot activity as being any more strange than the irregularities of our weather cycles, such as the severe drought that has afflicted the southeastern USA for the past few months.

Sorry Hornblower; if the sunspot cycle that has an average cycle of 11 years and a standard deviation of +/- one year suddenly stops for over six solar cycles (70 years) and you see than as normal then I’m afraid there is nothing I could possibly say or show that would ever convince you that what I have to say has value. To solar scientists the Maunder Minimum is one of the greatest mysteries recorded in modern time.

To sum up in one concise statement what you are missing is what I’ve been saying: “There are two things that influence the sunspots we see and record. One is in the Solar Dynamo that gives us the solar cycles and the other is external to the solar dynamo and it influences how many we see.”

What JimP has shown in his chart is that Jupiter’s orbit of the sun could possibly be related to the external portion. As long as you view the Maunder Minimum as not strange or normal then JimP’s chart and any explanation I have to offer would be of no use to you.

I hope that is concise enough.

Jim

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I broke the sunspot cycle maximums into 4 separate groups.

Group 1: Sunspot maximums located in torque cycles with peaks exceeding 1.E+39



Group 2: Sunspot maximums located in torque cycles with double peaks in the center



Group 3: Sunspot maximums located in torque cycles in the negative range



Group 4: Sunspot cycle 19 with a maximum at 1957.9 just didn’t fall into the pattern of the first 3 groups. After looking at cycle 19 more closely I found that the monthly sunspot numbers were over 100 from 1956.2 until 1960.9. This places the start of the high sunspot numbers near a peak of the torque cycle.

I’d say this pretty much nails it. The barrycenter cycle of the solar system influences the sunspot cycles.

I think I was a bit hasty when I made that statement. What I should have said was “Given our current understanding of our solar systems physics, it is highly unlikely that our solar systems barrycenter influences sunspots. However, it is equally unlikely that all of the correlations I have shown in this thread are just due to two systems with similar cycle lengths.

You did not answer my question in post #48. Here it is again:

You appear to be arguing that some sort of interactive force could suddenly tip the Sun's spin axis about 90 degrees, cause it to remain pointed at the Earth for about 70 years, and then return it to its familiar position. If that force is not gravitational, then what is it, and how can it be intense enough to cause this action?

Hi JimP, nice thread. This barycenter point is interesting. You will forgive me for refreshing my understanding at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_...r_in_astronomy
which states, for the Sun and Jupiter, "The Sun orbits a barycenter just above its surface." If I understand correctly, the single barycenter point of the system is a composite function of all planetary vectors to the sun.

Your hypothesis looks perfectly reasonable to me, if the claim is that the sunspot cycle is a solar tide for which the biggest input is the Jupiter orbit. But in a harmonic system I don't understand why distance would be the key variable.

I am wondering if the solar cycle can be conceptualised by analogy with ocean tides on earth. Phil Plait's helpful summary of tidal forces is at http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/planets.html. And http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tide#Ti...ings_and_neaps has a good diagram of how spring (high) tides occur when sun earth and moon are lined up while neap (low) tides happen when sun earth and moon form a right angle. The Moon causes about 2/3 of earth's tides while sun causes about 1/3 and the other planets combined about 0.

So, six questions:
1. Could your hypothesis suggest that planetary tides cause sunspot cycles?
2. Is a plot readily available of the temporal path of the barycenter of the solar system based on planetary locations?
3. Would such a plot tabulate factors for planetary tidal influence on solar activity?
4. Could you look for variations in solar activity correlating to whether Jupiter and Saturn were aligned or orthogonal?
5. Would this enable testing of whether tidal factors of other planets could push the solar cycle out of neat alignment to Jupiter distance?
6. Any idea why distance is the determining variable?

I think your statement, except for one word, is exactly what I’m trying to say. The only word I would change is “arguing” to “modeling”, because I am trying to model the sun. The difference is as George Box the Statistician once said; “All models are wrong, some however are useful”. Models can be mathematical, visual or physical. The model I have of the sun and solar system is both math and visual, and when I think about the sun and solar system I use this model.

You also have a model that you use when you think about the solar system and your model is both math and visual and is Mainstream. Your model has been proven over time and it helps answer many questions about our solar system. It is a gravitational based model and the math is also well proven. The math is based mainly on Kepler’s and Newton’s work.

The problem for me is this Kepler Newton model can’t help explain events like The Maunder Minimum or any mini or full scale ice age. What I am trying to do is to see if the model I have developed can help explain these cold events better. I found that if I could somehow pull a pole of the sun towards the earth I would see fewer sunspots and because the main flow of heat and solar radiation out of the sun would be away from the earth and that should lower the temperature. As you said I need to pull a pole of the sun about 90 degrees to face the earth. Initally I had two thoughts 1: something very big hit the sun or 2: the gravitational pull of the planets is doing it. I ruled the first one out because early in 1600 Galileo found that the sun had sunspots and there were many people tracking events on the sun. If something hit it, it surely would have been recorded. I also ruled out gravity, it is simply too weak to have any major effect. In other words the Kepler – Newton model won’t work.

For me to make my model work I needed to start thinking of it like a gyroscope, because it does work like one. The outer rotates about 15 times faster than the inner portion creating a problem; this spinning is causing it to become more fixed. But we still have the planets rotating and they contain a lot of angular momentum. The planets also rotate around the sun in an ellipse and as they get closer to the sun they speed up; Kepler’s second law.

---- The Difference Between Your Model and Mine ------

Using the ice-skater analogy

In your Kepler-Newton based model the skaters arms are not connected to the skater and when you bring them in closer the arms simply go faster with little effect to the skater (sun).

In my model they are connected and when the arms come in the skater goes faster. The problem in the case of the solar system there are nine arms connected to the sun and they are going to try and keep the sun traveling the same speed and the question is what happens to the energy in the angular momentum? In my mind this is the guy’s thumb on the large brass gyroscope.

How can this happen for 70 years? I think a better question is how does even get back upright, because once it’s down something has to get it back up. Actually, the picture in my mind is probably only about 50 degrees tilt would be needed to create a Maunder Minimum, 90 degrees would be a big ice age. Note, that I didn’t get into the precession that would happen; that’s another story.

Jim

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I don’t know. I am not speculating on the physics involved. I am just looking at all of the correlations. At this point I would say that I believe the sunspot cycles are connected to the barycenter system for which Jupiter a big part of.

I don’t have that.

Astronomers have the ability to do such things. I’m not an astronomer and have no background in physics.

The dark green dots are aligned and the pink dots are when they are orthogonal. Cool!




I don’t know

I don’t have any idea. The only reason that I started looking into it is because I had read about other people getting some correlations tracking the sunspots by month. I knew that since Jupiter had an elliptical orbit that all months would not be equal in distance traveled. Jupiter’s velocity is constantly changing also. If you look at my data sheets that went with some of the graphs the number of records counted at the aphelion and perihelion are much higher.

Very interesting indeed. Your final chart shows that the axial aspects of Jupiter and Saturn correspond with surprising exactness to barycentric maxima and minima and sunspot cycles in 1880-1915. I note in your charts the barycentric sun spot pattern recurs with the following 180 year equivalences (divided by apparent groups with same shape).
1620-1655 = 1800-1840 = 1980-2020
1655-1700 = 1840-1880
1700-1735 = 1880-1915
1735-1760 = 1915-1940
1760-1800 = 1940-1980

I assume this is the well known 180 year cycle referred to by an earlier respondent in this thread. Now, it is readily visible in the Jupiter-Saturn chart that the alignments were precisely matched to the yellow sunspot indicator points from 1880-1915, and with a lag from 1915-1940. Could you look to see if the same line up happened from 1700-1760, where the match of the barycentric radius to the sunspot minima follows the same precise pattern?

Thank you for publishing these preliminary charts. They do need improvement for readability, for example the yellow sunspot dots are not named, the radius factor I assume is the Sun’s diameter, and the years do not need four decimal places. You might try a thirty six year scale dividing the 180 year pattern in five to highlight the similarity of shape of the two cycles in your data. Maunder Minimum wiki is at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maunder_minimum

Just a thought, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_rotation says solar rotation period is 25.4 days at equator. Barycentric tides on the sun will be small in % terms but will move immense quantities of mass over this ~monthly period, with significant variance for the main planetary axial alignments. It would be interesting to quantify the solar mass tidal cycle against planetary cycles and look to see the size of factors such as the 20 year Jupiter Saturn cycle.

So, planetary angular momentum of Jupiter as a main factor in the sunspot cycle. Have you looked at similar orbital speed chart inflection points for the other gas giants?

Yesterday I brought data in from Alcyone Ephemeris program hoping to relate Jupiter and Saturn from a table. My points on the graph were all over the place. When I went back to the program and visually lined the planets up with the Sun I came up with a very consistent pattern.

I did not put in all of the dates because 1) I was mainly looking for patterns and the dates seemed to just clutter up the graphs and 2) because it was a lot of extra work. The dates were the dates supplied from the Barycenter data. There are 43,000 records and I am going to have to export them to Fox Pro and convert the dates. I just haven’t done that yet. The yyyy.dddd format is not one that Excel recognizes as a date. I’ve been working back and forth between 4 date formats: mm/dd/yyyy, yyyy.dddd, and yyyy.mm. And yyyy.mmm which is yyyy.mm converted to decimal. Hopefully, I’ve kept everything straight. J

If anyone wants my spreadsheets send me a PM with your email and I’ll send you copies.
The Sunspot Cycle dates can be gotten here.

Below are graphs of the 4 Barycenter metrics and Jupiter’s distance from the Sun. I sure that someone gifted in mathematics and astronomy (for which I am not) could develop a mathematical formula relating the Sunspot Cycle to Jupiter and the Barycenter Cycle if they could only clear their mind of preconceived prejudices.

I’ve circled some of the sunspot cycles which appeared to be inconsistent when just comparing them to Jupiter’s distance from the Sun. In the broader context of the Barycenter Cycle, they don’t appear to be inconsistent.

I think a better way to say it is: planetary angular momentum of Jupiter could have an effect on the number of sunspots we see on earth during a sunspot cycle.

Have I looked as data for other gas giants? No, because Jupiter has 60% of the total angular momentum and as JimP’s chart shows (if my theory is correct) Jupiter by itself only has an effect of about losing the ability to see an average of about 20. This is from his first chart.

Saturn has only 24% and Neptune only about 7% of the total angular momentum making their individual effect on the number of sunspots we see very small. But when they are combined together with Jupiter at their closest point to the sun we are working with their sums of angular momentum. This happened according to the data I’ve seen around 1645, the start of the Maunder Minimum and looking at the time for Jupiter and the other gas giants to align orbits at this point again would take many years.

They will come close again in 2020. What makes me believe angular momentum could contribute is that NASA’s top sunspot expert is predicting solar cycle 25 to be the weakest one on record, meaning from 1749 when the official records started. I don’t know how the NASA guy is doing his figuring but I would bet it is not planet location.

Jim

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This is a superb (I think new?) scientific finding. Congratulations! Your chart http://www.bnhclub.org/JimP/jp/comp1.JPG shows a precise pattern over 180 years linking sunspots, the barycenter and the angles of Jupiter and Saturn. Most clearly, the sunspot cycle minimum of ~1710, for example, occurred when Jupiter and Saturn were opposite and the barycenter radius was at minimum. This point of the cycle is precisely the same as the minimum of ~1890, 180 years later. This 180 year pattern runs through the alignment of minima dates with the angle of Jupiter and Saturn. The barycenter is at minimum radius when Jupiter and Saturn are opposite, and at maximum when they conjunct. This barycentric pattern aligns closely to sunspot minima dates.

The Jupiter-Saturn cycle period is 20 years, giving 10 years as the gap between minima, in apparent close tension to the observed 11 year solar activity average. I suspect that this pattern will become richer when Uranus and Neptune are included, and could be just so similar in the observed period because we are seeing two adjacent cycles in a much longer term deeper harmonic pattern.

You are right that the observations are consistent. The three you circle are at different points of the 180 year cycle in the data. When the same points of these cycles are compared (ie 180 years apart) they have precisely the same turning points in relation to the minima and the planetary aspects at many points, with small differences at other points.
With yyyy.dddd in column A put =LEFT(A1,4) in b1, =MID(A1,6,2) in c1 and =MID(A1,8,2) in d1, then paste these down the column. You can use concatenate to then turn this into a date by putting / in e1, and =CONCATENATE(C1,$E$1,D1,$E$1,B1) in f1, then paste special values column f into column g and cell format date dd/mm/yyyy as long as your dddd data is actually ddmm. You can probably turn column 2 into date format of yyyy and then use it for your chart.
Thanks