Oh sorry Jim I didn't appreciate that. Will take care in future.
Actually the diagrams that I post are usually PNG with limited colours and are quite small, like the baycentre one is 24KB. Does that still require a thumb?

I don't know what Uncle Al has to do with this.

I cannot show that it also applies to the relativistic content of matter. I will leave that to GR experts to determine, although I will say that I have not found agreement even amoung them.
Yes, that wold be true, but the radiation passes through there extremely fast and so is hardly affected, and the matter also moves very fast and so is little affected. Remember that the displacement achieved is 1/2 a t^2 so when a short time applies the effect is quite tiny.
You are obsessed with "mathematically". :-)

As I mentioned two or three times the radiation content and relativistic mass content of the Sun were discussed in another thread. No-one was of the opinion that the answer is known extremely accurately to the actual figures. There is no disagreement that the core of the Sun has much more radiation than the convection zone. The mean free path of photons is of the order of 1 mm there because of the much higher matter density. Nearer the surface the speed of radiation becomes thousands of times greater. Do you dispute this?

Mathematically, the speed of particles rises as a power of temperature. That means that the relativistic mass proportion of the matter at the core is much higher than at the surface. I don't intend to try to establish the exact amount as it depends on too many things. An order of magnitude estimate is sufficient for my purpose.
No you wouldn't. The distances that I am talking about are very small and the time periods very long. therefore the velocities are extremely small. Helioseismology measures velocity differences and would not be near to showing this. Actually it would have more chance of measuring the temperature difference in the two hemispheres. That is conceivable over a full solar cycle or two.
Your protests are rather silly in the face of the difficulties that I have explained (and you have not disputed) for actual quantification of several factors. These problems are not in my court but in standard solar physics. Why should I be expected to solve things in that area that the experts have not managed to do?

It is sufficient to show that the linkage of effects that I claim do exist and to give an order of magnitude estimate of the effects. I have done that.

Oh for goodness sake, Uncle Al's equations (Einstein I mean, in case you had not noticed) have everything to do with it, how else would you calculate the bending of the light passing by the sun, for which I gave the equations in this thread (albeit I copied them for simpicity's sake).

And yes I am "obsessed" by math, because that is the language of physics, if you had not noticed yet. You prefer to "do physics" by handwaving and prose. Sure, you can do that if you want but it does not bring you anything. It is like saying:

Well you need some wheat that somehow will be ground, and adding water and yeast and put it in a hot place you get bread.

I am sure many a housewife will not be very happy with this recipe. Call me the housewife of space physics, I am not very happy with your blahblah, thinking you have something important to say and then come up with nothing.

I do not ask you to do the impossible, number 1 question is THE BASE of your hypothesis, it would just make sense that at least you can derive that.

Well, I will let you simmer, and when you really come with some significant modeling, with some real results, maybe then I will return. Don't forget, you are obliged to answer these questions that are pertinent to your hypothesis, here in the ATM section.

__________________

Any comments in glorious red are to be considered in ModeratorMode.


善數, 不用籌策 (shàn shù, bù yòng chóu cè)
He who is good at counting, uses no counting tools
“A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is”
道德經, 二十七 (dào dé jīng, 27)

I'd suggest you consider the pan-and-scan possibilities. Also, one 24kb image shouldn't hurt, but when you have several on the same page, they add up.

Also, thumbs/links allow the viewer to have the image and the text open "side-by-side" so they can be cross-referenced; and the image can be resized to aid in viewing.

__________________
Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by ignorance or stupidity.
Isaac Asimov

LOL! There is a guy who posts or posted in sci.physics who goes by the name "Uncle Al" and I thought you meant him. Ok, with you now.
Yes that Al is relevant.
It isn't handwaving and prose. I have done calculations wherever possible. I have shown the actual amount that the planets will move the core of the Sun N or S within the uncertainties of the present day knowledge of the radiation and relativistic content of the Sun. I have shown from there that this will affect the temperature at the surface enough to explain the observed levels of fluctuation in the so called "solar constant".

However I cannot finish the job because it obviously has to be integrated into existing models of the Sun. I am not in a position to do that. However my objective is not to show exactly what happens but to show that this approach is fruitful in its results (the correlations etc that you also scoff at) and so should be adopted into solar models so that more definitive results can be achieved.

Your approach to all this is quite unreasonable when I have given these reasons many times and you have never disagreed with those reasons.
Well if you don't tell the housewife that she needs some ground wheat and yeast, what chance does she have of making bread? Up until now your housewife has been trying to make bread with wheat alone and I have told her that it cannot happen without yeats as well.
I don't understand what you are asking here. I have made clear the base several times. Are you referring to whether relativistic matter is also affected like radiation? If so, I have already stated that I think that it is but am not capable of doing the GR calculations. Even those that say they are capable of this do not give consistent answers. It is a moot point anyway, because you have acknowledged that it does apply to the radiation, so there is an effect it is a question of degree only.

So we have agreement that there is some such effect of uncertain degree due to several factors - the uncertainty of whether relativistic matter is affected the same as radiation, and the uncertainty in the actual radiation and relativistic mass content of the Sun. But there is an effect and the calculation based on the general form of the effect (greater acceleration of the core compared to the surface of the Sun) does lead to a clear calculation of the fluctuations in absolute displacement of the solar core.

Analysis of that absolute displacement shows it to have a number of frequencies which relate to planetary periods, especially pairs of the giant planets such as J-N and J+N, J-S and J+S and so on. The strong periods predicted by this means do agree with the strong periods observed in the Sun to the degree of accuracy that sunspot records allow. By this I mean that for the period since about the 1700s where we have annual means that are meaningful, the periods extracted by FFT or other means have a certain accuracy, but for the period from about 500 BC, the dominant 11.08 year cycle has been found by Schove and others to a greater accuracy.

Furthermore, this method actually provides the full mechanism (even if not perfectly quantified) and is the only proposal for how planets influence the Sun that demonstrates that the 11.07 year cycle is predicted to be stronger than the 11.86 year cycle of Jupiter's perihelion. Both the tidal and COM proposals result in the 11.86 year period being expected to have a much higher amplitude.
I am not simmering. And you aren't actually asking questions. Rather you are sniping. If there is some weak point in my argument then please ask me to explain something specific rather than just make sweeping generalisations.

But if you are expecting me to produce here a set of equations for modeling the solar interior to get the answer then it should be perfectly clear that this is not going to happen.

I have given the periods found in the absolute (I use this term in the mathematical sense meaning unsigned) barycentre motion over 512 years from 1500 to 2011. For comparison we should have the best determination of periods in the sunspot cycles over the same period, but reliable data only begins at about 1700, so will have to make do with the period 1700 to 2006. Because FFT only determines cycles that fit exactly into the interval this means that cycles periods would be rather coarse with this amount of data. For example, the difference between 27 and 28 cycles in 306 years is a period of 11.33 or 10.93 years. So methods that interpolate between the FFT values are needed.

One published paper that satisfies this requirement is by Olvera (pdf)(1). It has a graph that shows the spectrum of the sunspot cycle over a wide range of periods with the amplitude shown on a log scale. It is based on a periodogram method. It does not lable of list all the peaks in the spectrum, so I have enlarged the part of interest and read the values off and labeled a copy of that graph.

Just to be sure, I have used another method of measuring between the whole number of periods that FFT allows which compares sine waves with different periods to the sunspot record and finds the maximum covariance for each period (the maximum occurs when the phase is the same on average). I produced a graph of this for the range ~8 to ~14 years where the main action is taking place.

Just a cycles purist note: It should be understood that both Olvera's method and mine are measuring the frequency (or period) at closer intervals than FFT and so will get a finer result. But they still do not allow for the effect of interference between close frequencies and the ideal method is MESA (maximum entropy spectral analysis) which I don't have a working program for. So there may be displacements of peaks slightly when other major peaks are close to them in terms of how many cycles fit in the entire period - if within 1 or 2 or even 3 cycles they will have some effect.

{Hi Jim, I cannot work out how to put in a thumb to a graphic, so I am putting in just one and links to the other two. Can someone please tell me how to do thumb nail ghraphics?}

This is my analysis of the sunspot periods in the range ~8 to ~14 years. The numbers given are based on determinations at closer intervals (.01) than those ploted here (.1).


The spectrum by Olvera I have loaded here and the magnified and labeled part is here.

In a separate post I will tabulate the various cycles periods found in sunspots and in the barycentre motion for comparison now that we have good publicly available data on all of these.

References:

(1) ECE 538: STATISTICAL SIGNAL PROCESSING I, A Spectral Analysis of the Sunspot Time Series Using the Periodogram, Felipe E. Olvera, Jr., Student Member, IEEE

Now that all the relevant material has been brought forward we are ready to do a comparison of absolute barycentre cycle periods and Sunspot cycle periods.

(1) In post Explaining Planetary Alignments Relationship to the Sunspot Cycle http://ray.tomes.biz/barycentre-periods.png shows the barycentre periods found.

(2) Periods derived from long solar system motions over longer periods and these are known far more accurately. The barycentre periods will approach these values if longer periods are used. However it was desired to use a historical period for comparison with historical sunspots.

(3) Sunspot periods determined by Olvera as mentioned in my previous post.

(4) Sunspot periods determined by me as mentioned in the previous post. This is just as a cross check on the periods near 11 years which are slightly tricky to separate. The other periods are less influenced by each other.

Note that for longer periods the cycles analysis cannot determine the period anywhere near as accurately because there are so few cycles present.

Code:

   (1)         (2)         (3)       (4)
Barycentre  Planetary   - Sunspot Period -
Periods       Period     (Olvera)  (Tomes)
(years)       (years)    (years)   (years)

170      / 164.8   N    ~200
         \ 171.4  U-N
85          84.0   U    ~106 
57?         55.6  U+N     55.4
46          45.4  S-U     44.3
36          35.9  S-N     38.0
30          29.46  S      29.0
25?         25.00 S+N     24.1
23?         21.81 S+U     21.8
19.8        19.86 J-S     19.2
13.8        13.81 J-U     14.17     14.06
12.8        12.78 J-N     13.18     13.08
11.9        11.86  J      12.03     11.96
11.1        11.07 J+N     11.06     11.00
10.4        10.40 J+U     10.56     10.52
9.9          9.93 (J-S)/2 10.06     10.04
8.45         8.46 J+S      8.50      8.48
5.9          5.93 J/2

Conclusions

We see that the figures are generally similar. The weaker peaks in the spectra have generally been omitted or labeled with "?" above. The differences are small considering the period of data available. For example if we compare 11.86 years to (12.03 to 11.96) years we note that in 306 years there are 25.8 cycles, so that a discrepancy of 0.10 to 0.17 years represents just 0.22 to 0.36 cycles difference over that period which is about as good as can be hoped for.

The very longest cycles are not very good fits. When you only have 1.5 or 3 cycles in the data it is not possible to get an accurate fix (this incidentally is the same as the uncertainty principle).

Sorry about the image laden post further back - it is all too easy to sometimes not remember the needs of dial-up users!

BTW Ray, just make a small version of your image (the 'thumbnail') and embed that wrapped in a link to the big one like I have done below, then people can just click the 'thumbnail' to view the large one.

This graph is the SSB in the Solar Z Axis:

The top plot is distance in Z axis, the next is VZ (velocity in Z axis), the next is AZ (acceleration), and the last is delta_AZ.

This graph is the same as above, but all quantities have the sign removed (mathematical absolute):


Once again the 'waves' seem to shift phase with regard to the sunspot cycle, with no obvious link between them.

__________________
Carl Smith
The land of Oz

Hi Carl

you are right that there is no obvious link between the two.

The non-obvious link is that the spectrum of the two have a set of very similar periods in them as I have shown. As I have stated, the result does not give you a good correlation with the Sunspot numbers unless an additional assumption is made. That assumption is that there is a natural resonance of 10.5 years in the Sun with quite a high Q factor. Then it is possible to get a correlation of 0.66 with the sunspot numbers.

I began to make a spreadsheet to try an demonstrate this to you. However yesterday I bought some extra memory for my computer and when I installed it my computer stopped working and stayed that way after I took it out. I took in in for repair today (Saturday in NZ) but I won't get it back until Monday at the earliest. As I also mentioned, I will be away from Wednesday morning until the thread finishes, so suddenly the time has got squeezed.

At present I am logging in from another computer but I don't have ready access to all my files, so will do the best that I can to answer any further questions.

One note about the sign removal Carl - it is only the displacement that should have the sign removed.

Regards
Ray

Wow, not only can rtomes not show the first important part of his hypothesis (i.e. relativistic mass is being influenced twice as much by gravity than Newton would say) but now it is even shown that the phase of the "motions" and the sunspot phase shift relative to eachother.

Guess this put a nail to the coffin of how the sunspot period is caused.

__________________

Any comments in glorious red are to be considered in ModeratorMode.


善數, 不用籌策 (shàn shù, bù yòng chóu cè)
He who is good at counting, uses no counting tools
“A good scientist has freed himself of concepts and keeps his mind open to what is”
道德經, 二十七 (dào dé jīng, 27)

Did you not read my reply?

Did you not read my very first post where I stated quite clearly:
If you care to look at the cycles periods found in the two series you will see that I represented the true facts from the start.

There is no coffin to put a nail into.

OK, having followed the thread and looked at the graphs, there are a few things that come to mind:

1) there is no obvious direct connection between the Z-axis position of the SSB and sunspots, or with the differences taken to 3 levels (velocity, acceleration, and delta-acceleration).

2) we can rule out a direct link between SSB and sunspots.

3) the SSB cycles and sunspot cycle are similar timewise but have a phase shift.

4) we cannot at this stage rule out a less direct link if as Ray says the sunspots are internally driven by solar dynamic oscillations of unknown origin while torque impulses from the SSB only influence solar dynamics at times - and perhaps only when a threshold is exceeded - to rule this in or out would require a far more sophisticated analysis and perhaps hundreds of years more sunspot observations.

5) I have no idea how to implement Ray's 'displacement' in a spreadsheet or simple program - I have never studied calculus, but am quite capable of implementing quite sophisticated equations at a practical level if I understand the formulae and what they actually do, which can be learned quite easily from examining implementations of them and playing in a spreadsheet - perhaps some clues might help?

BTW, I am an old dog now, and have neither the time nor the inclination to take on any advanced maths or physics classes, and I am not likely to be writing any scientific papers in the near future - I will leave that to those with the necessary education and skills - but I will continue to potter around the edges poking at things and examining them to see what makes them tick

__________________
Carl Smith
The land of Oz

The Z measurement is directly proportional to the displacement, so nothing more needs to be done there.
Great.

Unfortunately my computer died and I had to buy another one today. I lost a lot of time that I had hoped to put into taking this a bit further, which is to develop the regression equation from the Z axis displacement to produce the sunspot numbers (with a correlation of at least 0.66). There is still a small chance of this, but in 1.5 days from now I will be away until the thread closes. So I will at least outline what is involved to make this final link, because it also gives big hints as to what would need to happen in a solar model to close the gap between the baycentre z movement and the actual sunspot numbers. It is clear though that you cannot get a bunch of periods the same in each if there is not some causal connection.

Most spreadsheets have a regression equation in them. What is needed is to make a equations that accomplish this...

Let d(t) be the z axis displacement at time t, and probably annually is often enough at least initially.

Let s(t) be the sunspot number for time t.

There then needs to be the solar oscillator with period close to 10.5 years, but we want the period to be a variable so that we can optimize it, say p. Also we need a Q factor for the resonance of that oscillator, call it q.

Then we must determine p and q so that the series d(t) will most accurately estimate s(t). Because the q factor will be reasonably high, we need a reasonably long run in period for d(t) before we can expect to get s(t) out. That is not a problem because we can get data on d(t) going back much further than s(t).

There might be a better way than this, but the way that I started to do it before my computer died is to have a sine and a cosine component of the oscillator (or you can use phase and amplitude equivalently) which is updated each period by advancing the proportion of the oscillator period and decaying by the proportion of the q factor and then adding in the new d(t) value. Then moving onto to the following d(t) and so on, producing the amplitude of the oscillator at each point in time. The correlation of this with s(t) is then examined and the values of p and q adjusted until a maximum correlation is achieved. There is no very complex maths involved. It can all be done in a spreadsheet and actually this way doesn't use regression at all.

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