Proposed Cause of 11-Year Sunspot Cycle - Hypothesis

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MolaKule

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One of the big questions in solar physics is why the sun's activity follows a regular cycle of 11 years. Researchers discovered that the tidal forces of Venus, Earth and Jupiter influence the Sun's magnetic field, thus governing the solar cycle.

The scientists systematically compared historical observations of solar activity from the last thousand years with planetary constellations, statistically proving that the two phenomena are linked. "There is an astonishingly high level of concordance: what we see is complete parallelism with the planets over the course of 90 cycles," said Frank Stefani, lead author of the study with Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), an independent German research institute. "Everything points to a clocked process...

11-Year Sunspot Cycle
 
Fascinating. It's interesting that it took this long to figure that one out.

As a rank amateur astronomer, I find all of it interesting. When I attend NASA lectures on various probes, I'm always impressed with the level of knowledge. So much data is unpublished and only available to the scientists involved.

Gravity: Earth and sun pull on each other with a force equal to 3.52 x 10^22 newtons. Seems like enough to have an effect.

The total density of the sun is said to be about 1.4 x that of water. But the outer "layers" are said to be about 1/5th that of earth. Or about like heavy packing peanuts.


It's also interesting that the sun was considered a variable star in the distant past. Some still consider it so. Plenty of implications with that one...
 
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More than 100,000 variable stars are known and have been catalogued, and thousands more are suspected variables. Our own sun is a variable star; its energy output varies by approximately 0.1 percent, or one-thousandth of its magnitude, over an 11-year solar cycle.

http://simostronomy.blogspot.com/2010/02/sun-is-variable-star.html

[Linked Image]
 
Originally Posted by Cujet
More than 100,000 variable stars are known and have been catalogued, and thousands more are suspected variables. Our own sun is a variable star; its energy output varies by approximately 0.1 percent, or one-thousandth of its magnitude, over an 11-year solar cycle.

http://simostronomy.blogspot.com/2010/02/sun-is-variable-star.html

[Linked Image]



Well for interesting stars, there's always Tabby's star. Although it's probably just cosmic dust, speculation was that it could be the start of a Dyson's Sphere or Swarm as it had dimmed by about 20%.

https://medium.com/futuresin/aliens-and-tabbys-star-everything-you-need-to-know-f8389b8f402a

Regardless of whether you believe in global warming or not, the sun is on track to heat up and get hotter as it fuses more hydrogen into helium and it will eventually turn into a red giant in about 5 billion years. But in just a billion years, the sun will be 10% hotter and the earth will be about 100 degrees hotter.

https://www.learnastronomyhq.com/articles/why-the-sun-will-become-hotter-and-brighter.html

https://www.space.com/22471-red-giant-stars.html
 
Thanks Molakule...that was really interesting.

(Tongue in cheek now) - so the sun is affected by Astrology ???
 
Originally Posted by Shannow
Thanks Molakule...that was really interesting.

(Tongue in cheek now) - so the sun is affected by Astrology ???


How come Astrology doesn't factor in those 2 trillion galaxies with their 100-400 billion suns each?
 
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As with the gravitational pull of the Moon causing tides on Earth, planets are able to displace the hot plasma on the sun's surface. Tidal forces are strongest when there is maximum Venus-Earth-Jupiter alignment; a constellation that occurs every 11.07 years. But the effect is too weak to significantly perturb the flow in the solar interior, which is why the temporal coincidence was long neglected.

However, the HZDR researchers then found evidence of a potential indirect mechanism that may be able to influence the solar magnetic field via tidal forces: oscillations in the Tayler instability, a physical effect that, from a certain current, can change the behavior of a conductive liquid or of a plasma. Building on this concept, the scientists developed their first model in 2016; they have since advanced this model in their new study to present a more realistic scenario


I was going say I didn't think the effect would have been strong enough due to the size of the sun but this mechanism they are referring to may be the answer. Interesting. I'm curious how the Sun impacts our climate.

I'm also curious how serious a CME would be and how likely the next big one would be.
 
The one that really raises my eyebrows is the solar activity that blew up telegraphs and set papers on fire almost 200 years ago, and how were kinda overdue for another similar event.

The sun is one heck of an interesting character.
 
Is there also a much longer cycle of variability in solar output?
We know that our current ice age was preceded by much warmer conditions in the far South and far North and we also know that things have been much colder not that long ago, like when the place where I'm sitting was covered in a kilometers thick glacier, which also gouged out the basins of what are now the Great Lakes.
The differentiation between glaciated and unglaciated land is sharp, with the unglaciated land quite close to here being hilly, rocky and untillable while the glaciated land is mostly flat with rolling hills and is easily farmed.
Interesting what we're learning about solar output, climate and weather, although it's not as though we can do anything about it.
 
I'm not certain that I buy the causality.

A "high level of concordance" does not mean that the one component causes the other.

The data is interesting. The degree of correlation fascinating.

But they fail to make the case for causality.

Do the interactions planetary magnetic fields in fact CAUSE fluctuations in solar output?

Or are the correlations manifestation of some, other, underlying, causal factor?

Phlogiston, perhaps?

Luminiferous Ether?

wink.gif
 
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Originally Posted by fdcg27
Is there also a much longer cycle of variability in solar output?


As I understand it, Little Ice Ages are believed to be caused by cycles in the sun, while Big Ice Ages are believed to be caused by cycles in the Earth's orbit.

We should soon know whether the former is true, because scientists who believe that theory are predicting we're in the early years of the next Little Ice Age.
 
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As I understand it, Little Ice Ages are believed to be caused by cycles in the sun, while Big Ice Ages are believed to be caused by cycles in the Earth's orbit.

We should soon know whether the former is true, because scientists who believe that theory are predicting we're in the early years of the next Little Ice Age.


Don't you think that all those astrology stuff and sun cycle periods can also make an influence on the human itself?
 
Originally Posted by AlexxMQ
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As I understand it, Little Ice Ages are believed to be caused by cycles in the sun, while Big Ice Ages are believed to be caused by cycles in the Earth's orbit.

We should soon know whether the former is true, because scientists who believe that theory are predicting we're in the early years of the next Little Ice Age.


Don't you think that all those astrology stuff and sun cycle periods can also make an influence on the human itself?


No need to think it, that's just a theory. You need data.

The solar orbiter was just launch by NASA so we should have some interesting data to look at in a few years.

https://www.nasa.gov/solar-orbiter
 
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