Planetary orbits may influence 11-year solar cycle
(Image: NASA)
Many thanks to SWLing Post contributor, Dan Van Hoy, who shares this interesting article via Space.com:
The orbits of Venus, Earth and Jupiter may explain the sun's regular 11-year cycle, a new study suggests.
A team of researchers from Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), a research institute in Dresden, Germany, showed that the magnetic fields of those three planets influence the cycle of solar activity, resolving one of the bigger questions in solar physics.
"Everything points to a clocked process," Frank Stefani, a researcher at HZDR and lead author of the new study, said in a statement. "What we see is complete parallelism with the planets over the course of 90 cycles."
The researchers compared observations of solar activity - like sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections - from the last thousand years with planetary alignments in order to show that there was in fact a correlation, according to the statement.["]