Celestial Mechanics - Blog Posts
Circling the Sun (larger)
Do you know that as a PhD student at my university they let you check out books for 4 months?
Here I am, I become the hoarder of books that I was always meant to be
RESONANCES! They affect everything!
Every 11 years, the Sun cycles through from riotous flare and sunspot activity to a quieter period, before ramping up again. It’s almost as regular as clockwork, and for years astronomers have been wondering what causes it. Now, they’ve proposed a new solution.
Even though the Solar System’s planets are much smaller than the Sun, the gravity of some of them is able to influence our star’s magnetic field. This, the researchers assert, is what controls the solar cycle.
Venus, Earth, and Jupiter assert a small gravitational tug on the Sun as they orbit it. The result is comparable to the way the Moon’s gravity influences Earth’s tides, producing a regularly timed ebb and flow.
The team has traced back 1,000 years of solar cycles, between the years 1000 and 2009 CE, comparing that data against the movements of the planets in that time. They found an impressively strong link between the two.
“There is an astonishingly high level of concordance: what we see is complete parallelism with the planets over the course of 90 cycles,” said physicist Frank Stefani of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf in Germany.
“Everything points to a clocked process.”
What the team found is that the tidal forces are strongest when Earth, Venus, and Jupiter align, and that this alignment occurs every 11.07 years - falling at the same time as the solar minimum.
Continue Reading.
Unexpected great discoveries. Calculating the cosmos: How mathematics unveils the universe. By Ian Stewart.