- Alternating groups of planets could be ganging up on the Sun, causing an energy cycle.
- It seems that alternating groups of researchers may be doing the same about Sun theories.
- When planets align, the effects of their gravity on the Sun can combine into a larger force.
In newly published research, scientists from Germany’s largest research group have tried to pinpoint 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 one umbrella theory. The explanation, they say, could be as simple as the orbiting planets—the way the Moon influences our tides on Earth. The research took place at the Helmholtz Center in Dresden-Rossendorf and appears now in Solar Physics.
The Sun is enormous, and can seem all-powerful to us here on puny Earth. But inside, it shares some things in common with Jupiter and even Earth. The Sun doesn’t have any kind of solid mass, instead comprising white hot gas and plasma—the vast majority of which is hydrogen. But its enormous magnetic field is created by a spinning effect, known as the solar dynamo, that’s related to both Earth’s own spinning and molten core and Jupiter’s mysterious interior.
It also may be surprising that the planets, with their measly little gravities, can end up affecting the Sun at all. But the planets are held in careful equilibrium. The Sun pulls them, and they orbit at a consistent distance without being pulled in... thankfully.
The planets’ gravity does pull back on the Sun, at least a little. Jupiter is the biggest culprit, which makes sense—it’s 11 times the diameter and 318 times the mass of Earth, after all. But in this research, the scientists found that Earth and Venus are also involved.
“Starting on the high-frequency side, we show that the two-planet spring tides of Venus, Earth, and Jupiter are able to excite magneto-Rossby waves,” which are one of the types of cyclical change that the Sun experiences, the researchers explained. In other words, these planets occasionally line up with each other from the perspective of the Sun, and that combines their individual gravitational influences. This could explain the shortest of the Sun’s cycles, which lasts 11 years.
There are similar multiplicative overlaps in the Sun’s longer cycles. Jupiter and Saturn combine forces about every 20 years, and the Sun’s own motion pushes it closer to or further away from the exact center of the Solar System in a less regular shape, so there’s another cycle every 193 years that may be related. And the grandaddy of them all is a cycle that’s over 2,300 years long, in which Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune all act together.
These arguments—even while well supported—carry some controversy within the solar science community. People have studied how the planets affect the Sun for a long time, and even theorized about these cycles of various lengths. “The main problem with the problem at hand is that even its very existence is not generally accepted,” the researchers wrote. “Au contraire, a couple of recent papers have vehemently refuted any claim for phase stability.”
Every reputable scientific paper carries dozens of references and serves as a stepping stone from which other scientists can keep iterating. The Sun is particularly hard to study, and researchers must assemble their cases with care based on observations from millions of miles away and through heavily filtered (but non-blinding) viewers. They also use indirect observation to shade in (pun not intended) missing pieces of the Sun’s mysteries.
“[W]e consider the phase stability of the Schwabe cycle as a serious working hypothesis, for which it seems worthwhile to find a reasonable physical explanation,” the researchers concluded. “If new data show up to give unambiguous evidence to the contrary, we will be the first to declare this paper as misleading and futile.”
Who knew studying the Sun was so salty?
Caroline Delbert is a writer, avid reader, and contributing editor at Pop Mech. She's also an enthusiast of just about everything. Her favorite topics include nuclear energy, cosmology, math of everyday things, and the philosophy of it all.
