Congratulations to Nicola Scafetta, who has just published another major paper on the relationship between planetary cycles and solar activity variation. This new paper explores a viable physical mechanism which potentially explains the now well known correlations the solar-planetary community has been discovering and documenting here at the Talkshop and elsewhere on the net (see the blog roll). Nicola has been successful in drawing together several of these discoveries and underpinning them with a coherent physical theory. Bravo Nicola! A landmark moment in the development of knowledge about our solar system. I’ll keep this post at the top of the blog while discussion develops.
Does the Sun work as a nuclear fusion amplifier of planetary tidal forcing? A proposal for a physical mechanism based on the mass-luminosity relation.
Nicola Scafetta, 2012.
Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 81–82, 27–40.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682612001034
Abstract
Numerous empirical evidences suggest that planetary tides may influence solar activity. In particular, it has been shown that: (1) the well-known 11-year Schwabe sunspot number cycle is constrained between the spring tidal period of Jupiter and Saturn, 9.93 year, and the tidal orbital period of Jupiter, 11.86 year, and a model based on these cycles can reconstruct solar dynamics at multiple time scales (Scafetta, in press); (2) a measure of the alignment of Venus, Earth and Jupiter reveals quasi 11.07-year cycles that are well correlated to the 11-year Schwabe solar cycles; and (3) there exists a 11.08 year cyclical recurrence in the solar jerk-shock vector, which is induced mostly by Mercury and Venus. However, Newtonian classical physics has failed to explain the phenomenon. Only by means of a significant nuclear fusion amplification of the tidal gravitational potential energy dissipated in the Sun, may planetary tides produce irradiance output oscillations with a sufficient magnitude to influence solar dynamo processes. Here we explain how a first order magnification factor can be roughly calculated using an adaptation of the well-known mass-luminosity relation for main-sequence stars similar to the Sun. This strategy yields a conversion factor between the solar luminosity and the potential gravitational power associated to the mass lost by nuclear fusion: the average estimated amplification factor is A=4.25×10^6. We use this magnification factor to evaluate the theoretical luminosity oscillations that planetary tides may potentially stimulate inside the solar core by making its nuclear fusion rate oscillate. By converting the power related to this energy into solar irradiance units at 1 AU we find that the tidal oscillations may be able to theoretically induce an oscillating luminosity increase from 0.05–0.65 W/m2 to 0.25–1.63 W/m2, which is a range compatible with the ACRIM satellite observed total solar irradiance fluctuations. In conclusion, the Sun, by means of its nuclear active core, may be working as a great amplifier of the small planetary tidal energy dissipated in it. The amplified signal should be sufficiently energetic to synchronize solar dynamics with the planetary frequencies and activate internal resonance mechanisms, which then generate and interfere with the solar dynamo cycle to shape solar dynamics, as further explained in Scafetta (in press). A section is devoted to explain how the traditional objections to the planetary theory of solar variation can be rebutted.
From the conclusion:
The tidal movement consistently and
continuously squeezes and stretches the entire Sun from the
center to the surface. The solar mass can be moved and mixed by
gravitational tidal forces also because of the fluid nature of the
solar plasma. However, even in this case only a tiny fraction of the
gravitational tidal energy can be released as heat to the Sun (see
Eq. (18)), and nothing would be expected to happen if only
released tidal gravitational energy is involved in the process, as
Newtonian classical physics would predict.
However, a planetary tidal massaging of the solar core should
continuously release additional heat to it and also favor plasma
fuel mixing. Consequently, the Sun’s nuclear fusion rate should be
slightly increased by tidal work and should oscillate with the tidal
oscillations. In Section 3.3 we have proposed a methodology to
evaluate a nuclear amplification function (Eq. (32)) to convert the
gravitational potential power released in the core by tidal work
into solar luminosity. The strategy is based on the fact that
nuclear fusion inside a solar core is kept active by gravitational
forces that continuously compress the core and very slowly
release additional gravitational energy to it, as the hydrogen fuses
into helium. Without gravitational work, no fusion activity would
occur either because the two phenomena are strongly coupled
(Carroll and Ostlie, 2007).
The preliminary results of this paper suggest that for better
understanding solar activity, the physical interaction between the
planets and the Sun cannot be dismissed, as done until now.
Future research should better address the nature of these couplings,
which could also be used to better forecast solar activity
and climate change (Scafetta, 2010, in press). In fact, planetary
dynamics can be rigorously predicted.
The full paper is available here.
Closely related papers:
Be sure to visit Nicola Scafetta’s website, where papers and a summary of his work are presented.
Scafetta N., 2012. Multi-scale harmonic model for solar and climate cyclical variation throughout the Holocene based on Jupiter–Saturn tidal frequencies plus the 11-year solar dynamo cycle. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 80, 296–311.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682612000648
Click to access scafetta_jstides.pdf
Scafetta N., 2012. Testing an astronomically based decadal-scale empirical harmonic climate model versus the IPCC (2007) general circulation climate models. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 80, 124–137.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682611003385
Scafetta N., 2012. A shared frequency set between the historical mid-latitude aurora records and the global surface temperature.
Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 74, 145-163.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682611002872
Scafetta N., 2010. Empirical evidence for a celestial origin of the climate oscillations and its implications Original Research Article
Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 72, 951-970.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682610001495
Scafetta N., 2009. Empirical analysis of the solar contribution to global mean air surface temperature change Original Research Article
Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 71, 1916-1923.
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1364682609002089
Tallbloke's Talkshop 
Nicola has been pulling out all the stops to get the hypotheses we’ve been working on into the literature. Everyone involved in solar-planetary work should be delighted. I spotted this citation in the bibliography:
Wilson, I.R.G., Carter, B.D., Waite, I.A., 2008. Does a spin–orbit coupling between
the Sun and the Jovian planets govern the solar cycle? Publications of the
Astronomical Society of Australia 25, 85–93.
Nicola’s paper is very readable though technical, and a huge amount of time and effort has gone into it.
Mille Grazia Nicola!
The solar cycle (11-year) length is variable and the average length depends on the averaging period. For example it was longer in the 19th century than in the 20th century. I guess it will vary at all periods/time-scales.
Hi Edim, There are longer and shorter cycles in both centuries, the average doesn’t very much at the centennial scale.
Keep looking Nicola at all the harmonies in our little system, the basic work of science in its discovery of truth is its own reward, those of us with lessor minds appreciate well what you are doing. The stagnation in scientific endeavour due to dogma has been an anathema to many people and your efforts are truely welcomed.
Hi Tallbloke, using scl ‘data’ from here:
Click to access 2011_00000005_00000001_74TOASCJ.pdf
I get:
sc4 – sc13 11.7 y
sc14 – sc23 10.7 y
I bet all the colder periods have lower average solar cycle frequency and vice versa.
Thanks Edim: that’s a bigger difference than I expected. The resonant cycles involved have all been calculated and presented here before. Scafetta additionally does a nice job of comparing offset cycle periods. Regardless of the timings though, the big news in this paper is the viable physical mechanism Nicola has worked out in section 3: (Estimation of the planetary tidal heating and its nuclear fusion amplification factor in the solar core). That is what will mark this paper out as important, and should be the main focus of discussion I think. I really hope people read the paper. I’ve linked the copy Nicola Scafetta sent me in the first comment.
Quite an effort ….But…what is gravity?
Click to access cosmos_without_gravitation.pdf
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=ah63dzac
I agree tallbloke. Scafetta does a very nice job and his papers are very interesting – unfortunately there are too many interesting papers/articles and too little time to study them in detail.
One thing is certain – solar activity is affected (jerked?) by planetary cycles.
Delightful. One reason I started reading this blog: It expands my scientific horizons. 🙂
Hmm… still have reservations about (small) tidal effects of planets being able to influence the conjectured fusion processes going on deep in the centre of the sun.
Perhaps the link between planetary orbits and solar activity can be better explained by entrainment, with changing levels solar activity causing adjustments to the observed orbits of planets over periods spanning millions of years.
The mechanism causing this entrainment being lots of small ‘kicks’ from the suns varying charge field (TSI & solar wind). Jupiter also has a massive charge field, which must be considered regarding the entrainment of planetary orbits.
I am skeptical about gravity being main driver of the solar magnetic cycles, but since I have no access to the article any comment may be irrelevant.
Science is finally turning to the magnetic planetary link (Nature 16.05.2012)
‘Superflares’ erupt on some Sun-like stars
http://www.nature.com/news/superflares-erupt-on-some-sun-like-stars-1.10653
Schaefer and others have previously suggested that magnetic interactions with nearby Jupiter-like planets could be to blame. “In a [regular] solar flare, you have magnetic fields coming out of one sunspot and going into its companion sunspot and those get twisted and they break,” he says. Instead, he says, the magnetic field could go out of the superflare star and connect to a ‘hot Jupiter’ nearby, acting like a rubber band connecting the two. As the planet orbited, the field would tauten, getting stronger by drawing the planet closer, until it ultimately snapped, releasing massive amounts of energy.
My recommendation to Dr. Scafetta is to expand his horizons by studying theory and principles of classic electro-magnetism, where the forces are bi-directional, bi-polar and transmutable, while gravity is none of these.
Vuk: all forces are operative, and we don’t know what the relative strengths are yet, so all angles need investigating. By the way, last I heard, gravity was operating in both directions between masses.
Michael: Good to see open minds taking the time to read and consider the matters involved.
Slightly worrying that stars of similar age to ours sometimes produce super-flares…
“Could superflares occur on the Sun today? Maehara thinks not, as most of the superflare stars in his study seem to sport starspots much larger than those on the Sun, for unknown reasons.”
Too many holes in current solar model to have any confidence in it. Need a new useful model PDQ.
Congratulations, Dr. Scafetta. Your research is truly inspirational. I have a question about Figure 13. I believe there are at least two possible explanations for the 5 sunspot number (red plot) peaks between 8 to 8.8 year periodicities and the peaks at ~14 and 15 year peiods. They could be (1) radiation pattern sidelobes or perhaps (2) they are coincident with Mercury, Venus, and Earth tidal amplitude peaks.
If they can be shown to coincide with planetary tide amplitude peaks, this would be extremely convincing additional evidence of a direct planetary tide relationship to sunspot activity. If, on the other hand, there is no clear correlation, the sidelobe explanation is most likely still valid.
-G. E. Pease
tallbloke says: May 18, 2012 at 6:01 pm
……
Hi Tb
For two bodies (forces are always shown as vectors), bi-directional as: inward (attract) and outward (repel); terminology used in a different education system, I was taught physics, by an ex Russian Academy of Science émigré.
A further note on my previous comment. Since the synodic periods (relative to Earth) of Mercury and Venus are respectively only 0.317 and 1.599 years, the only way I can see it possible to get the particular longer period tidal side peaks is through identification of “extra” syzygies of these planets caused by long-period resonances with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Mars should be included in a compilation of these long-period resonant syzygies, even though its tidal contribution is very weak. The “extra” syzygies can probably only be found by a thorough search of the JPL ephemerides, since two-body theory, even extended two-body theory, is not sufficient for this task.
tchannon says:
May 18, 2012 at 8:32 pm
vuc, did you mean taught?
[I’ve edited thought to taught, and removed the questioning comment –Tim]
English words with -ght are real pain; you should go phonetic, we done it 150 years ago. It’s Vuk (vukcevic, kc not ck)
[apologies, simple mistake. Moderator housekeeping so this comment will vanish. –Tim]
Nah, we should go back to the original pronunciation of ght words. It would require more phleghm.
As an aside… a while back there were a few earthquake predictions posted here, in comments I believe. Any chance of more? They were interesting, and I wonder if there’s any increased chance of a quake during the upcoming solar eclipse.
To Gerry says:
In my paper I am not addressing the origin of the other peaks.
The peaks around 8-9 years and 14-15 were also detected in the power spectrum of the speed of the sun relative to the baricenter.
see figure 6 in my paper “Scafetta N., 2010. Empirical evidence for a celestial origin of the climate oscillations and its implications. Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 72, 951-970.” (go to my new web-site http://www.duke.edu/~ns2002/ )
So those cycles are also related to planetary motion. But because I did not discuss them in the paper I have no definitive answers.
The fast periods are due to spring tides among the planets. There are many of them. In the paper I discuss only partially those cycles such as in figure 12B. A more detailed study may follow. But, as usual it will need its time.
The paper covers many issues, but not all possible issues. However, many things can be clarified in future research. So, please be patient.
Nicola,
Thank you. For the sample interval of the 2010 Figure 6A, the first SCMSS peak after eight years is clearly seen, as are the 14 and 15 year peaks. For the full 1749-2011 period of your 2012 Fig. 13, I think the other solar velocity peaks between eight and ten years might also show up, and I suspect that planetary spring tides also exist at those SSN peaks.
If that proves to be true, it could very neatly show the dependence of solar activity cycles on planetary spring tides, and perhaps on solar motion with respect to the solar system barycenter as well.
Compression waves etc. within the sun moderating fusion. Brilliant, opens lots of doors!
Nicola, a wee English hint from your first sentence: “Numerous empirical evidences suggest that planetary tides may influence solar activity.”
There are no “evidences” — or softwares or informations or …
These are collective nouns, and not grammatically or syntactically separated into units. Like air and water and sand, they are measured in bulk quantities, not countable. So if you want to refer to countable parts, you have to use another noun together with the collective one, like “pieces of evidence”, or “molecules of air”, etc.
The WG1 drafts for the IPCC’s AR5 dismiss solar influences. Kirkby and his CLOUD experiments at CERN are not discussed. Likewise, not a single word about Scafetta or those pesky Danes or Nir Shaviv. Having dismissed natural drivers of recent global warming it follows by default (at least to Pachauri and his disciples) that CO2 must be the primary climate driver.
In the IPCC’s fantasy world the Hockey Stick lives:
Click to access WG1AR5_ZOD_Ch05_paleoclimate.pdf
The IPCC still clings to the discredited “Science” of tree ring thermometers while ignoring hard science from CERN and the ACRIM experiment.
Nicola has done really well to get have his paper published by such a high impact journal:
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/may03/bollen/05bollen.html
IDRT values, including IDR values and ISI IF values, for ten of the highest and lowest scoring journals are listed in Tables 2 and 3. The ten highest IDRT scoring journals consist of a range of journals relating to a variety of subjects. We find, for example, the Journal of Arid Environments, Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics, Remote Sensing of Environment and Planetary and Space Science, Trends in Biochemical Sciences. The set of high-ranking IDRT journals thus seems to correspond to space-based climatological observations relating to arid environments. The presence of the journal Planetary and Space Science seems to suggest an interrelationship with planetary studies. Indeed, LANL RL management validated these results by pointing to recent, directed efforts at LANL to support this type of research, which recently culminated in the production of the first map of hydrogen distribution on Mars.
Hopefully, this will lead to serious consideration by the physics community and further papers from others following the trail blazed into the literature by Ian Wilson, Wolff and Patrone, and Nicola Scafetta. As the old guard get put out to grass, younger brighter minds will be able to consider the problems of elucidating and investigating the effects the planetary masses have on solar variation. They’ll be able to do this without being hampered by spurious argumentation from certain quarters, falsely claiming that the viable physical mechanisms proposed can be dismissed on the grounds of simple classical mechanics. The Sun is not a point like mass, or a perfectly elastic billiard ball. It is a seething wobbly mass of plasma with energy pouring from its centre. Static consideration of forces is inappropriate to defining the situation.
Nicola has suffered similar difficulties over this as Nikolov and Zeller did. Getting people to realise that the dynamic situation in the atmosphere with solar energy pouring through it is not well characterised by or analogous to the simple examples of pressure and temperature in enclosed spaces presented in text books.
There’s a lot of science communication work on the road ahead. We’ll have to overcome science by soundbite (the Sun is in perfect freefall) and explanation by elevator speak (you must present your new theory in 10 lines). That kind of stipulation favours the status quo, and is promoted by its defenders and gatekeepers. They have no place in the realm of real scientific discourse and the advancement of knowledge.
Congratulations to Nicola Scafetta for getting his new paper published in
a such prestigious Journal. His collective publications have now reached
such a critical mass that the main stream is being forced to confront the
possibility that the planets play a role in determining changes in the level
of solar activity.
Well Done!
I want emphasize that the following comments are not meant to distract from the wonderful work that Dr. Nicola Scafetta is doing in highlighting the planetary solar connection. He is putting in the hard yards and he is doing a great job, so more power to him!
In all honesty, the following comments could apply to any one of us who are contributing to planetary-solar [and planetary-climate] connection, including my own.
The biggest mistake that the Climate alarmists is to assume that because they cannot come up with a natural explanation for the rapid warming of the latter part of the 20th century, then whatever excess warming that occurred, must be due to anthropomorphic CO2 emissions.
The warmists’ overlook this glaring hole in their argument for the simple reason that they desperately want to believe that human CO2 emissions are responsible for most of the
atmospheric warming.
Of course, well most trained scientists know that the general level of climate science is so poor, that the inability of climate scientists to come up with a natural explanation for the late 20 th century warming does not necessarily mean that one doesn’t exist.
However, most climate scientists are so desperate to believe that it is humans who are responsible for the warming, they refuse to even consider the possibility that there might be a natural explanation. This is where blind religious faith trumps reason and logic.
Unfortunately, I am worried that skeptics are now in danger of committing the same sin as the warmists.
I believe that most of us on this blog are convinced that there must be a connection between changes in the level of solar activity and planetary motions. We might argue about the specific method that is responsible for the connection but we all share a firm belief that the connection is real. As far as most of us are concerned, all that is needed is a workable hypothesis to explain
the connection, and its only a matter of time before one comes along.
Currently, the solar-skeptics are proposing all sorts of ideas/hypotheses/models to explain the link between the level of solar activity and planetary motions. We are all convinced that the traditional solar dynamo model [driven by differential rotation] dismally fails to explain the observed changes in level of solar activity.
The biggest danger that skeptics face is that in our zeal for an explanation sometimes blinds us the basic scientific tenet that it up to us to disprove the scientific status quo, if we want to be taken seriously.
This means that if we propose a mechanism or model, it must be based upon hypotheses that can be proved by observation and logical scientific reasoning. It is no good proposing that the connection between solar activity and planetary motion can be explained by the fairies at the bottom of the garden [please note: I am not saying that anyone, living or dead, is proposing such an absurd idea, I am just using an extreme argument to make a point]. What we have to do is to convince others that what the fairies at the bottom of the garden are saying is in fact true. This
is our responsibility and, as difficult as it may be, we cannot shift this responsibility onto those who defend the status quo.
This does not mean that I am asking people to reign-in their enthusiasm for coming up with new
and interesting ideas/hypotheses/models to explain the solar-planetary connection. On the contrary, one of the wonderful dilemmas that we have, is that there is a near-certainty that a connection does exist, and all that is missing is a plausible explanation, no matter how implausible or strange it may be.
This is where I applaud the work of Nicola Scafetta, and the others on this blog, because they are willing to push the scientific envelop in order to seek out this explanation. And one thing is
for sure, when they find it, it will most likely be even more weird and wonderful than most of us could have ever imagined.
Hi Ian: I agree with everything you say, and we have chosen a knotty problem, because it’s not easy to find out what goes on inside the Sun. But the same goes for the dynamologists. Like Nicola, I don’t rule anything out, and it may well be that there is a combination of planet entrained dynamo action as well as direct planetary effects.
My main point above and an important point in Nicola’s paper is that a planetary connection cannot be dismissed by appeal to classical Newtonian mechanics, since it does not fully characterise the problem to be addressed.
Beyond this, we have better correlations and a model which reproduces solar grand minima successfully. This puts us ahead of the mainstream theorists. Prediction is the key in situations where observational evidence cannot be gathered to settle the issue. Our hindcasts are good, and we can predict beyond the next cycle. This means we have a lot more going for our theory than the dynamo-only theorists have going for theirs.
This image is from a comment during March where I have been critical of NS. (Nicola Scafetta) although this instance is a minor point.
Clarifying the result above, the chirp z-transform numbers agree closely enough with the similar method employed by NS. and is the limit for a discrete transform on that data. I show a reconstruction based on non-discrete which gives the row of figures overlaid and are the true periods. Nicely this puts a number on the term which does not resolve by conventional methods. Proof is the reconstruct (and by implication subtract/null out).
All that said the data is not very good, is inconsistent, is only for the visible side of the sun, suffers math artefacts from poor processing to monthly.
Switching to daily data and avoiding missing data, from 1/1/1849 the result is very different but ought not to be.
Doing this is difficult, has to be semi-blind because a discrete transform cannot resolve periods finely enough on short data even though the sampling is better. Shape match is convincing.
A fourier plot shows a broad distorted hump.
My position on this is whilst work can be done on sunspot data as-is there are so many obvious “problems” it is not useful. My thoughts continue along the lines of the causal is bipolar but sunspots unipolar. Data decode/transformation is needed before spectral work can yield up.
I’m still slowly working towards this but other things get more of my time.
If it is useful I can show a rough result for the shorter time period.
I find this article and its comments both intriguing and exciting.
While I lack the scientific credentials and knowledge to thoroughly understand the material, I am gratified that those who do have the wherewithal are hard at work on these knotty problems. Also, even with my meager level of understanding, I do “get” the basic concept(s) of some of the ideas presented.
tallbloke, I’m never disappointed when I visit your site. You are (no doubt) one of the most fairminded people in the world, and it’s a pleasure to read your rejoinders to others’ comments.
The solar cycles of apparent lengths 7.3 to 9 years and 13.5 to 17.1 (!) years are tabulated here:
Click to access sunspot.pdf
p. 3
I have identified the specific solar cycles of interest with asterisks.
TABLE 2 Length of the Sunspot Cycle
Cycle Lengths
Year of Year of (from minima) (from maxima)
Minimum Maximum (yr) (yr)
1610.8 1615.5 8.2* 10.5
1619.0 1626.0 15.0* 13.5*
1634.0 1639.5 11.0 9.5
1645.0 1649.0 10.0 11.0
1655.0 1660.0 11.0 15.0*
1666.0 1675.0 13.5* 10.0
1679.5 1685.0 10.0 8.0*
1689.0 1693.0 8.5* 12.5
1698.0 1705.5 14.0* 12.7
1712.0 1718.2 11.5 9.3
1723.5 1727.5 10.5 11.2
1734.0 1738.7 11.0 11.6
1745.0 1750.3 10.2 11.2
1755.2 1761.5 11.3 8.2*
1766.5 1769.7 9.0* 8.7*
1775.5 1778.4 9.2 9.7
1784.7 1788.1 13.6* 17.1*
1798.3 1805.2 12.3 11.2
1810.6 1816.4 12.7 13.5*
1823.3 1829.9 10.6 7.3*
1833.9 1837.2 9.6 10.9
1843.5 1848.1 12.5 12.0
1856.0 1860.1 11.2 10.5
1867.2 1870.6 10.7 10.2
1889.6 1894.1 11.9 10.6
1913.6 1917.6 10.0 10.8
1923.6 1928.4 10.2 9.0
1933.8 1937.4 10.4 10.1
1944.2 1947.5 10.1 10.4
1954.3 1957.9 10.6 11.0
1964.9 1968.9 11.6 11.0
1976.5 1979.9 9.7 10.7
1996.5 2000.3 12.4 –
2008.9
Average 11.0±1.5 11.0±2.0
These anomalous-length cycles deserve a closer look. There are few enough of them that the planetary configurations and motions in those intervals can be examined closely to see if there is matching periodic behavior.
[updated, see 2 msgs down –tim]
HPJ: Thanks for the kind words, I try to live to the principle of reasonable debate, but occasionally my blunt yorkshire biker banter slips through… 🙂
Gerry says:
May 19, 2012 at 7:13 pm
Yes, there is a lot going on with maxima and minima dates and Jovian configurations. For both maxima and minima dates, it is common for Ju to be in line with Ur or Ne. While if Sa is in line with Ne, max/min will tend to occur when Ju is then more square to Ne+Sa. The same type of thing happens when Ur is in line with Ne, and is an example of one of the fewer times when max or min can have Ju in line with Sa.
Again, max/min tends not to happen where Ju is in line with Ur+Sa, and delays till Ju is either being more square to them, or in line with Ne. The exception to this is when all three are square to Ne.
Complicated yes, but seemingly repeatable, and some kind of logic to it.
The most curious thing is that the first good analogue of the Dec 2008 minimum, back 65400d (1829.9) is a maximum ! ? which seems to point to the sunspot cycle wobbling along with the JEV cycles well over the whole series, but the Jovian cycles have reversed sync with the sunspot cycle maxima and minima.
Thanks Ulric,
Also, here are the current updates to the last entry of the Cycle Lengths table:
Cycle Lengths
Year of Year of (from minima) (from maxima)
Minimum Maximum (yr) (yr)
1996.5 2000.3 12.4 –
2008.9
By the way, if cycle 24 max is March 14, 2013 (2013.2) or later, the dash will become =/>13.5* years!
*Anomalously long solar cycle 🙂
Btw SC`s 12, 14 and 22 are missing off that list Gerry
Ulric Lyons says:
May 20, 2012 at 3:32 am
Btw SC`s 12, 14 and 22 are missing off that list
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I’m not sure how that happened. These entries were in the original list, from
Click to access sunspot.pdf
p. 3:
1878.9 1883.9 10.7 10.2
1901.7 1907.0 11.9 10.6
1986.8 1989.6 9.7 10.7
I copied the entire list into MS Notebook, and somehow those three rows disappeared!
Ninderthana says:
May 19, 2012 at 5:01 pm:
“The biggest mistake that the Climate alarmists is to assume that because they cannot come up with a natural explanation for the rapid warming of the latter part of the 20th century, then whatever excess warming that occurred, must be due to anthropomorphic CO2 emissions.”
I think you summed up the absurdity of the IPCC’s approach pretty well. They systematically discredit or ignore natural sources of climate change and then credit everything to CO2.
If their hypothesis was correct their “Climate Models” would have no trouble predicting the future or back casting the past. In reality, the CMIP5 ensemble has better back casting skills than any previous set of climate models as long as you don’t go back more than 150 years.
A few things:
1) I shake a lamp post, initially it doesn’t move much but if I continue with the same harmonic resonance (shaking) that will change and the lamp post will begin to sway more violently. This is why the oceans themselves in tidal resonance to the moon feature a greater motion than can be explained via the present-time blunt gravitational force.
2) That said, I think the real breakthrough will manifest once we realize the Sun is a plasma-electric star (no charge = no magnetic field). Plasma particles react strongly to magnetic, gravitational, and electric forces. Heck if you monitor the Sun’s surface you’ll find electric arcs in significant abundance. The planetary issue comes into much larger significance when this is realized.
Dynamo theory is likely wrong, if the nuclear fusion theory is correct it isn’t the only thing..plasma-electric can no longer be denied..in fact dynamo theory is merely a parameterized theory to explain the magnetic fields without ‘charge’.
Mainstreamers are usually wrong, look back in history..once one hears the word ‘mainstream’ they should think ‘uh oh’ look where ‘mainstream’ Shiat has got us thus far..nowhere.
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Roger,
very well done. The mass-luminosity relation may be the key for understanding the issue. Essentially, the planetary gravity add to the solar gravity. So the sun with the orbiting planets would be equivalent to a star with a mass sligthly larger than the solar mass. Thus. its luminosity needs to increase. Because the tides oscillate, the luminosity needs to oscillate as well.
The propagation mechanism may be through wave mechanism like the sound. May there be a neutrino connection? Who knows.
What it is evident to me is that arguments based only on classical physics (look at Leif) cannot be considered conclusive. As I wrote:
The theoretical results of this paper, which are based on modern physics, would rebut the second major objection against the planetary-solar theory, which uses arguments based on classical physics alone to claim that planetary tides are too small to influence the Sun (de Jager and Versteegh, 2005;Callebaut et al., 2012). Indeed, the failure of the 19th century Kelvin-Helmholtz timescale theory claiming that the Sun is about 10 million years old instead of the currently accepted age of 4.7 billion years (Carroll and Ostlie, 2007) demonstrates that classical physics alone does not explain how the Sun works by a large factor. Indeed, the well-known fact that stars are not classical physical systems can invalidate any argument that uses classical physics alone to disprove a planetary tidal influence on the Sun.
I have updated a short summary of my research here
http://www.duke.edu/~ns2002/#astronomical_model
Dr. Scafetta,
After spending some time with this, I have the feeling that the major problem is getting heat from the core to the surface. Most of the TSI fluctuations come from the bright faculae that surround sunspots and “plages.” These are shallow features which come from the convective zone. I would prefer to see a mechanism where tidal action promotes shallow convection by shearing and agglomerating convective cells.
I propose an alternative scenario. The sun is embedded in its own magnetic field which physically couples it to the heliosphere. Any movement of the sun in this web of magnetic fields must result in stresses transmitted from the heliosphere/corona to the surface and the underlying plasma, by the mechanism of magnetic coupling. These shear stresses are the cause of agglomeration of the convective cells and an increase in TSI. These same shear stresses can also stretch and break the toroidal field lines which then reconnect to cause sunspots.
So in this scenario we are not really talking about gravity alone, we are talking about gravity causing the solar barycentric orbit, which in turn causes shearing of the convective cells by magnetic field gradients in the surface layers of the sun. It would be of interest to see whether differential rotation of the solar surface is connected to barycentric motion.
Regards,
Hi Pochas: As I understand it, Nicola is proposing that fluctuations in the core energy production rate are transmitted by fast moving wave to the tachocline and manifest as the solar variation we see via changes in convection which appear soon after. The variation in heat takes much longer to travel, and is smoothed out by the time it reaches the solar surface.
Your proposal sounds like a combination of Wolff and Patrone 2010, and Lanscheidt 1979/Dich 1964. Scafetta also refers to W&P2010 so maybe there’s some common ground. I think that until we know more, we should work on the assumption that all viable mechanism are operative. This is a pragmatic position which leaves the door here at the Talkshop open to all the different hypotheses and their proponents, and means we won’t wrongly dismiss something at an early stage and potentially lose sight of something important.
[…] pagina Web personale dell’autore, dove trovate anche tutte le altre sue pubblicazioni. Come leggiamo anche da Tallbloke, altro blog climatico che ha dedicato attenzione a questo lavoro, questa volta Scafetta ha dato il […]
About the issue regarding hw the energy signal comes out, I would like to point out that my paper does not focus on that issue. I simply suggest that more complex mechanisms such as wave propagations may be working to transmit fast a signal. This make sense because if there is an increase of fusion rate the core must expand and all olar interior feels this expansion quite fast. An expansion would produce an higher flux of energy out . These hypotheses are explained in the paper.
However, the paper does not focus on the above issue which is just qualitatively addressed.
As I said many times, the most important thing that people in blogs like this one need to understand and realize is that scientific reseach is not made by simply buying a book on Amazon where the answers to all questions are already clearly written.
Scientific research needs a lot of time. And the issues are addressed one by one. In time, the full picture will become more complete.
Think for examle at the paper by “Dirk K. Callebaut, Cornelis de Jager, Silvia Duhau” published on the journal just before my two last papers. Callebaut et al. were arguing that planetary geometry does not have anything to do with knows solar dynamics and using classical physics they argued that the gravitational effects of the planets are too small.
My last two papers rebut strongly both the above claims.
Of course not all physical issues are solved yet, but things are moving. Just be patient.
In the understanding of all things there are no hard questions, only the answers are hard. When understanding catches up to the questions the questions become simple and easy knowledge.
All things in nature and the universe are robust because they operate at the minimum of parameters. Science tends to look at the Heath Robinish approach of huge complication and works back wards to simplicity and understanding. How many parts comprise the entire life of every thing
4 in DNA.
The complications we see make it hard for us to comprehend the simple underlying functions that control small and large things in the natural world and the universe.
If a Harrier jump jet landed in a city of Mesopotania some thousands of years ago, how would the leading scientist of the day explain it and its workings. Today for us no problem but what we are trying to understand is no less puzzling. One must always remember the great scientists of the day that said heavier than air aircraft would never fly on about the same day that Wilber proved them wrong. Sadly they never looked out the window to see the heavier than air birds flying.
The simplicity is masked in a cloak of chaos and this gives charlatans a living. Tallbloke and all those here with a scientific input toward truth thank you. P.S. I have been a free spirit biker for sixty years and still love a good corner.
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