Move over dark matter, here comes the photon mass

Spiral galaxy NGC 5457 aka the Pinwheel Galaxy [image credit: European Space Agency & NASA]

OK, that’s not the original title of the article below – but it sounded a bit more interesting from a layman’s perspective 🙂

The rotation of stars in galaxies such as the Milky Way is puzzling, says Phys.org.

The orbital speeds of stars should decrease with their distance from the center of the galaxy, but in fact, stars in the middle and outer regions of galaxies have the same rotational speed.

This may be due to the gravitational effect of matter that we can’t see. But although researchers have been seeking it for decades, the existence of dark matter has yet to be definitively proven and we still don’t know what it might be made of.

With this in mind, the physicists Dmitri Ryutov, Dmitry Budker and Victor Flambaum have suggested that the rotational dynamics of galaxies might be explained by other factors. They hypothesize that the mass of photons, which are particles of light, might be responsible.

#BBC propagandising our children with pseudoscience, again

The BBC website hosts handy revision notes for our kids. Who vets the information? Some time ago I posted about their claim that melting sea ice raises the sea level, Archimedes be damned. Now we find that the BBC thinks that dinosaurs invented space travel and colonised Saturn’s moon Titan, forming it’s seas of methane after they died. The idiocy is unbounded.

Obliquity, inclination and eccentricity of Earth – a model: Part 2

Kepler’s trigon – the orientation of consecutive Jupiter-Saturn synodic periods, showing the repeating triangular shape (trigon).

This of course follows on from the very recent Part 1 of the model. Since Jupiter and Saturn are the dominant planets in our solar system, we can speculate that they may have a significant effect on the obliquity of smaller bodies. Or they may not – no-one knows, but we can look at possible evidence.
– – –
Precession of the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction (J-S) was worked out by Kepler centuries ago, as shown in his diagram to the right.

‘As successive great conjunctions occur nearly 120° apart, their appearances form a triangular pattern. In a series every fourth conjunction returns after some 60 years in the vicinity of the first. These returns are observed to be shifted by some 7–8°’ – Wikipedia.

Obliquity, inclination and eccentricity of Earth – a model: Part 1

Earth’s Axial Tilt, or Obliquity [Credit: Wikipedia]

First let’s get the approximate target numbers for the model.

‘The inclination of Earth’s orbit varies with respect to the solar system’s invariant plane with a period of roughly 71000 years.
. . .
Taken in conjunction with the 26000-year spin-axis precession, the 71000-year orbit precession causes a 41000-year oscillation in the tilt of the earth’s axis, about plus or minus 1.3 degrees from its average value of 23.3 degrees. This number is not absolutely stable – it depends on the combined positions of all the planets through time.’

Astronomy: precession of Earth (Washington State University)
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Origin of the 100 kyr Glacial Cycle: eccentricity or orbital inclination?

‘Spectral analysis of climate data shows a strong narrow peak with period ~ 100 kyr, attributed by the Milankovitch theory to changes in the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit. The narrowness of the peak does suggest an astronomical origin; however the shape of the peak is incompatible with both linear and nonlinear models that attribute the cycle to eccentricity or (equivalently) to the envelope of the precession. In contrast, the orbital inclination parameter gives a good match to both the spectrum and bispectrum of the climate data.’

Richard A. Muller — University of California, Berkeley and
Gordon J. MacDonald — University of California, San Diego

Valentina Zharkova incorporates planetary theory into solar activity model

Last Wednesday I attended the talk by Professor Valentina Zharkova hosted by the GWPF in London. She delivered a superb lecture including news of new work improving her model by including quadrupole magnetic parameters. In the Q & A session that followed, I got the opportunity to point up the connection between her model output and Rick Salvadors.

I got a very positive response, including an invitation to collaborate on further work. We discussed this further over dinner, when I gave her a printed copy of Rick’s 2013 PRP paper.

Stealing from the Solar System: the effects of a stellar fly-by

The highly tilted orbit of Eris compared to the orbits of Ceres (light blue), Jupiter (maroon), Saturn (orange, Uranus (green), Neptune (blue), Pluto (olive, and MakeMake (red) [image credit: Fandom]

Could a ‘rogue’ star passing nearby have disturbed outer parts of the early solar system? Beyond Neptune things become somewhat different.

The outer reaches of our solar system harbor a number of mysterious features. Astrobites reports on whether a single stellar fly-by could help explain them all.

A star is born from the gravitational collapse of a cloud of gas and dust. Yet not all of the material ends up in the star, and instead forms a flat protoplanetary disk that surrounds the new star. Over time, the materials in this disk coalesce to form planets, moons, asteroids, and most other objects you might expect to find near a typical star.

Since protoplanetary disks are flat, the expectation is that all of the planets and objects orbiting a star that formed out of a protoplanetary disk should orbit on a single plane. So when we find stars with planets that orbit at multiple different inclinations, this raises questions.

Parker solar probe nears launch: Heavy lifting imminent.

credit John Kraus / http://www.johnkrausphotos.com .

The Parker solar probe is headed for space tomorrow. Best of luck to the mission team.

Rick Salvador’s 2013 Pattern Recognition in Physics solar prediction now validated

Our hypothesis that solar variation is affected by planetary motion, developed over the last 10 years here at the talkshop received a boost today when one of its main detractors, Anthony Watts, published an article declaring that solar cycle 24 is entering minimum.

I’ve left a comment there, something I rarely do since the debacle back in 2014 when Anthony and his sidekick Willis attacked our work and banned discussion of our solar-planetary theory. I’ll be interested to see if it passes moderation.

Here’s the plot I linked. It shows that Rick Salvador’s model is spot on track over the last 5 years.

Policymakers! Listen up!

I was trained as an engineer and then did a degree in the History and philosophy of science.

I know how to calculate forces, I understand thermodynamics and radiative theory and I don’t ignore data inimical to any hypothesis.

After thirty years of monitoring and appraising the data, the global warming hypothesis and working out what really causes climatic change I’ve concluded that it ain’t CO2. The real causes of climatic change at the planetary scale are the enormous forces transferring energy between solar system bodies.

Jupiter and Saturn between them hold over 85% of the angular momentum of the system. Venus has, within an order of magnitude, the same gravitational force on the Earth-Moon system as Jupiter. The two of them have shaped the orbit of our Moon, whose tidal forces have a profound effect on the overturning circulation of Earth’s oceans, which contain 1000 times more heat than the atmosphere of which CO2 comprises 0.04%.

Astronomers discover galaxies spin like clockwork

Spiral galaxy [image credit: BBC]

Researchers refer here to ‘regularity in galaxies’.

Astronomers have discovered that all galaxies rotate once every billion years, no matter how big they are, reports Phys.org.

The Earth spinning around on its axis once gives us the length of a day, and a complete orbit of the Earth around the Sun gives us a year.

“It’s not Swiss watch precision,” said Professor Gerhardt Meurer from the UWA node of the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR).

“But regardless of whether a galaxy is very big or very small, if you could sit on the extreme edge of its disk as it spins, it would take you about a billion years to go all the way round.”

Major breakthrough in solar-planetary theory: Barycentre research vindicated

As long time regulars at the Talkshop know, our ongoing research into the links between planetary motion and solar variation has occasionally borne fruit in unexpected ways. The ‘shorthand’ for the sum of all planetary vectors is the Sun’s motion with respect to the barycentre of the solar system. This is the path the Sun is forced to follow by the ongoing evolution of the motion of all the planets. We have found various tantalising near-correlations between aspects of this motion and solar activity levels suggestive of some kind of mechanistic linkage.

We have been ridiculed for years by the WUWT wankers among others for working on this theory. Various other solar researchers have attempted ‘disproofs’ of a planetary effect on solar activity too. They all tell us the planets are “too small and too far away to affect the Sun”.

Last year, we featured a post concerning the work of Shepherd, Zharkov and Zharkova, who have been coming at the solar variation problem from another angle. They resolved the solar-hemispheric components of the solar polar fields into two separate curves, representing shallow and deep solar ‘dynamos’.

Combining the curves together produces a good representation of changing solar activity levels. Their prediction is, like ours from our planetary model, for a big solar slowdown extending through the middle decades of this century. The mainstream climate scientists tried to get the press release revoked…

Ian Wilson: Help Needed to Solve an Interesting Lunar Puzzle

Astrophysicist Ian Wilson has emailed me to ask for a brainstorming session at the talkshop to assist him. Ian writes:

“I was wondering if you or your colleagues (e.g. oldbrew) could help me work out the solution to the following lunar puzzle”

The Conundrum

The diagram below shows the Perigee of the lunar orbit pointing at the Sun at 0.0 days. In addition, the diagram shows the Perigee of the lunar orbit once again pointing at the Sun after one Full Moon Cycle (FMC) = 411.78443025 days. It takes more than 1.0 sidereal year (= 365.256363004 days) for the Perigee to realign with the Sun because of the slow pro-grade (clockwise) precession of the lunar line-of-apse once every 8.85023717 sidereal years.

1.0 FMC falls short of 15 anomalistic months (= 413.31824817 days) by 1.53381792 days (= 1.5117449198^O). During these 1.5117449198 days the Perigee end of the lunar line-of-apse rotates by 0.17081406^O in a prograde direction, producing an overall movement of the line-of-apse (red line) of 1.34093086^O (= 1.5117449198^O – 0.17081406^O) with respect to the Earth-Sun line (blue line).

Half-mile wide asteroid close approach on Wednesday

Credit: VIRTUAL TELESCOPE [click to enlarge]

Dr Roy Spencer discusses today’s asteroid approach, the closest for 13 years.

An asteroid capable of destroying Washington D.C. and New York City at the same time will be making its closest approach to Earth on April 19.

At a half-mile wide, it will have over 30,000 times as much mass as the 2013 meteor which exploded over Russia in 2013.

The current asteroid, called “2014 JO25“, is traveling at the unimaginably fast speed of 75,000 mph. It has been estimated that an asteroid of this size is capable of wiping out an area the size of New England, and causing global cooling from the dust that would be lofted into the stratosphere.

“2014 JO25” will be the closest approach asteroid of this size in the last 13 years.

Wrong-way asteroid plays ‘chicken’ with Jupiter

Credit: IB Times

It’s not yet known what the origin of asteroid (or comet) ‘Bee-Zed’ is or if it’s one of a class of similar objects in retrograde co-orbital resonance, as Phys.org reports. The researchers say ‘how it got there remains a mystery.’

For at least a million years, an asteroid orbiting the “wrong” way around the sun has been playing a cosmic game of chicken with giant Jupiter and with about 6,000 other asteroids sharing the giant planet’s space, says a report published in the latest issue of Nature.

The asteroid, nicknamed Bee-Zed, is the only one in this solar system that’s known both to have an opposite, retrograde orbit around the sun while at the same time sharing a planet’s orbital space, says researcher and co-author Paul Wiegert of Western’s Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Tim Channon

With sadness, I’m sharing the news that my Talkshop co-blogger Tim Channon passed away on Friday. Tim had been bravely battling with cancer for some time, and was still upbeat and lively-minded when I spoke with him last week. Since then unfortunately, medical complications set in.

Tim was one of a kind. A humorous, thoughtful and technically brilliant individual. His contribution to our understanding of cyclic phenomena through the analysis software he wrote propelled me into my own research. His patient recording of weather data and survey of UK weather stations demonstrate the depth of interest and passion he had for bringing facts to bear on the climate debate. His dedication, skill and good natured rebukes against uninformed speculation and bad theory puts him in the Pantheon of great sceptical thinkers and scientists.

Tim will be missed and remembered.

_____________________________________

New theory explains how the moon got there

A key point of the new theory is that as the Moon migrated outwards from Earth, its orbit reached a critical distance where the Sun’s gravitational influence overtook that of the Earth, as Phys.org explains. Needless to say there’s more to it than that.

Earth’s Moon is an unusual object in our solar system, and now there’s a new theory to explain how it got where it is, which puts some twists on the current “giant impact” theory. The work is published Oct. 31 in the journal Nature.

The Moon is relatively big compared to the planet it orbits, and it’s made of almost the same stuff, minus some more volatile compounds that evaporated long ago. That makes it distinct from every other major object in the Solar System, said Sarah Stewart, professor of earth and planetary sciences at the University of California, Davis and senior author on the paper.

“Every other body in the solar system has different chemistry,” she said.

Young stellar system caught in act of forming close multiples

The three star system, with two young stars closer together and one further out.
[credit: B. Saxton (NRAO/AUI/NSF)]

ScienceDaily reports an unusual (to date) set-up involving three stars with a clear relationship in their average distances from each other. Quote: ‘The most central of the young stars is separated from the other two by 61 and 183 times the Earth-Sun distance’. The ratio of 61:183 is 1:3

For the first time, astronomers have seen a dusty disk of material around a young star fragmenting into a multiple-star system.

Scientists had suspected such a process, caused by gravitational instability, was at work, but new observations with the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) and the Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array (VLA) revealed the process in action.

X-rays detected from the dark side of Venus

2012 Venus transit [credit: JAXA/NASA/Lockheed Martin]

Venus is certainly an oddball in various ways. Is that the ghost of Velikovsky lurking in the background to this story?

Venus and Mercury have been observed transiting the Sun many times over the past few centuries. When these planets are seen passing between the Sun and the Earth, opportunities exist for some great viewing, not to mention serious research.

And whereas Mercury makes transits with greater frequency (three times since 2000), a transit of Venus is something of a rare treat. In June of 2012, Venus made its most recent transit – an event which will not happen again until 2117.

Luckily, during this latest event, scientists made some very interesting observations which revealed X-ray and ultraviolet emissions coming from the dark side of Venus.

Nicola Scafetta: On the astronomical origin of the Hallstatt oscillation found in radiocarbon and climate records throughout the Holocene.

 

Nicola Scafetta writes:

Dear all,

it was a pleasure to meet you at London. Some of you asked me about my paper in press about a link between astronomical, solar and climate oscillations. Here it is:

Scafetta, N., Milani, F., Antonio Bianchini, A., Ortolani, S.: On the astronomical origin of the Hallstatt oscillation found in radiocarbon and climate records throughout the Holocene. Earth-Science Reviews 162, 24–43, 2016. There is a free access to the article, and is valid for anybody until November 10, 2016 by using this link  http://authors.elsevier.com/a/1TlSB2weQTZcD

(Permanent copy here)

The importance of the article is that it demonstrates quite clearly that the long Hallstatt oscillation (about 2318 year period), which is observed in climate and solar records is a major stable resonance of the solar system. The paper also evaluates the other major planetary stable resonances and we found all other typical oscillations found in climate and solar records such as a quasi 20-year oscillation, a quasi 60-year oscillation, the 82-97 year Gleissberg oscillation and the 159-185 year Jose oscillation (and others).

Astronomy shown to be set in standing stone

Brodgar standing stones, Orkney [image credit: BBC]

University of Adelaide research has for the first time statistically proven that the earliest standing stone monuments of Britain, the great circles, were constructed specifically in line with the movements of the Sun and Moon, 5000 years ago. H/T ScienceDaily

The research, published in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, details the use of innovative 2D and 3D technology to construct quantitative tests of the patterns of alignment of the standing stones.