Scientists probed the sun’s heartbeat – and found something remarkable

“Hearst Magazines and Yahoo may earn commission or revenue for certain articles through these links.”

• Alternate groups of planets can join the Sun, causing a cycle of energy.

• It appears that alternating groups of researchers may do the same regarding theories of the Sun.

• When the planets align, the effects of their gravity on the Sun can combine into a greater force.

In newly published research, scientists from Germany’s largest research group have tried to identify something amazing: the Sun’s “heartbeat,” a tide-like cycle that ebbs and flows over an 11-year period. In the paper, they combine three known phenomena affecting the Sun and combine them under an umbrella theory. The explanation, they say, could be as simple as the planets orbiting—the way the Moon affects our tides on Earth. The research was carried out at the Helmholtz Center in Dresden-Rossendorf and now appears in Solar Physics.

The sun is big and may seem all-powerful to us here on puny Earth. But internally, it shares some things in common with Jupiter and even Earth. The Sun has no solid mass of any kind, instead consisting of white-hot gas and plasma—the vast majority of which is hydrogen. But its large magnetic field is generated by a spinning effect, known as the solar dynamo, that is associated with both Earth’s spinning, molten core and Jupiter’s mysterious interior.

It may also be surprising that the planets, with their low gravity, can end up touching the Sun at all. But the planets are kept in careful balance. The sun pulls them in and they orbit at a steady distance without getting pulled… thankfully.

The planets’ gravity pulls away from the Sun, at least a little. Jupiter is the biggest culprit, which makes sense – it is, after all, 11 times the diameter and 318 times the mass of Earth. But in this research, scientists found that Earth and Venus are also involved.

“Starting from the high-frequency side, we show that spring tides with the two planets of Venus, Earth, and Jupiter are able to excite magneto-Rossby waves,” which are one of the types of cyclic changes the Sun experiences, the researchers explained. . In other words, these planets occasionally line up with each other from the perspective of the Sun, and this combines their individual gravitational influences. This may explain the shorter cycles of the Sun, which last 11 years.

There is similar multiplicative overlap in the longer cycles of the Sun. Jupiter and Saturn combine forces about every 20 years, and the Sun’s own motion pushes it closer to or farther from the exact center of the Solar System in a less regular fashion, so every 193 years there is another cycle that can be linked . And the granddaddy of them all is a cycle that is over 2,300 years long, in which Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune all act together.

These arguments – although well supported – carry some controversy within the solar science community. People have studied how the planets affect the Sun for a long time and have even theorized about these cycles of different lengths. “The main problem with the problem at hand is that even its existence is not generally accepted,” the researchers write. “On the contrary, several recent papers have strongly refuted any claims of phase stability.”

Any reputable scientific paper carries dozens of references and serves as a cornerstone from which other scientists can continue to iterate. The Sun is particularly difficult to study, and researchers must piece together their cases carefully based on observations from millions of miles away and through heavily filtered (but not blinding) viewers. They also use indirect observation to shadow (unintended work) the missing pieces of the Sun’s mysteries.

“[W]consider the phase stability of the Schwabe cycle to be a serious working hypothesis for which it seems worthwhile to find a reasonable physical explanation,” the researchers concluded. “If new data emerge to provide clear evidence to the contrary, we we will be the first to declare this document fraudulent and useless.”

Who knew studying the Sun was so salty?

You may also like