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Evokal
member
Reged: 02/12/09
Posts: 42
Loc: Manitou Springs, CO
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Hello everyone,
I was looking Jupiter up for the fun of it and I found out that Jupiter's orbit is 11.86 earth years. This immediately made think of the solar cycle. I did some more digging and found this article:An Influence by Jupiter on the Sunspot cycle?
Is this common knowlege that I have somehow missed? It seems to make a lot of sense... 
Michael
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darkstar528
Postmaster
Reged: 03/06/07
Posts: 6783
Loc: Hodgenville, Kentucky, USA
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Interesting article...
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Blue skies,
Stephen "Darkstar" Ames
PST(#96038), VIXEN 8-24mm,CEMAX 2x Barlow, Thousand Oaks White Light Filter and a Meade Elec EP
CFI, CFII, MEI, working on EIEIO!
BAA Member
My solar site:
http://seemysunspot.com
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David Knisely
Postmaster
Reged: 04/19/04
Posts: 8275
Loc: Beatrice, Nebraska
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Quote:
Hello everyone,
I was looking Jupiter up for the fun of it and I found out that Jupiter's orbit is 11.86 earth years. This immediately made think of the solar cycle. I did some more digging and found this article:An Influence by Jupiter on the Sunspot cycle?
Is this common knowlege that I have somehow missed? It seems to make a lot of sense...
Michael
Nope, it is probably just a numerical coincidence. The sunspot cycle's average length is about 11 years, while the orbital period of Jupiter is about 11.86 years. Thus, one might be tempted to forge a link where none really exists. The cycle's length has ranged from a low of nine years to a maximum length of 13.67 years, so it is tough to get much of a consistent correlation between the length of the cycle and Jupiter's orbital period. Jupiter is massive for a planet, but it is only about one one-hundredth of one percent (0.0114%) of the mass of the sun. It orbits at such an extreme distance that its tidal forces exerted on the sun which might significantly affect the interior are pretty minimal. The eccentricity of Jupiter's orbit is not very large (0.0489), so the variation in the already small tidal effects from Jupiter's aphelion to perihelion are again not very large. The sunspot cycle is generated internally to the sun and is governed by magnetic fields rather than by forces exerted by gravitational interaction. Jupiter has a relatively strong magnetic field (for a planet), but again, it orbits so far from the sun that it is not able to interact very strongly with the local solar surface or interior magnetic fields. One can play with numbers and cycles and other things to come up with alleged factors, but the sun ends up being its own master, doing pretty much whatever it wants to do. Clear skies to you.
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David W. Knisely
Hyde Memorial Observatory
http://www.hydeobservatory.info
Prairie Astronomy Club
http://www.prairieastronomyclub.org
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bandazar
member
Reged: 10/19/05
Posts: 66
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may sound kooky... but there are some theories about the universe being influenced more by electricity, than by gravity:
http://www.holoscience.com/news.php?article=by2r22xg
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brianb11213
Carpal Tunnel
Reged: 02/25/09
Posts: 2098
Loc: 55.215N 6.554W
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Quote:
but there are some theories about the universe being influenced more by electricity, than by gravity
Well, the electromagnetic force is rather a lot stronger than gravity, which can be more or less ignored for object groups where the most massive is less than a kilogram and where distances are measured in millimetres rather than nanometres.
I get the impression that there are rather a lot of things going on in the solar system that we understand badly or not at all, it wouldn't surprise me unduly if the magnetic behaviour of the Sun's photospheric region (sunspots) turned out to be another one.
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