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posted by martyb on Saturday August 24 2019, @02:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the time-and-tide-waits-for-nobody dept.

One of the big questions in solar physics is why the sun's activity follows a regular cycle of 11 years. Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR), an independent German research institute, now present new findings, indicating that the tidal forces of Venus, Earth and Jupiter influence the solar magnetic field, thus governing the solar cycle.

[...] To accomplish this result, the scientists systematically compared historical observations of solar activity from the last thousand years with planetary constellations, statistically proving that the two phenomena are linked. "There is an astonishingly high level of concordance: what we see is complete parallelism with the planets over the course of 90 cycles," said Frank Stefani, lead author of the study. "Everything points to a clocked process."

[...] Besides influencing the 11-year cycle, planetary tidal forces may also have other effects on the sun. For example, it is also conceivable that they change the stratification of the plasma in the transition region between the interior radiative zone and the outer convection zone of the sun (the tachocline) in such a way that the magnetic flux can be conducted more easily. Under those conditions, the magnitude of activity cycles could also be changed, as was once the case with the Maunder Minimum, when there was a strong decline in solar activity for a longer phase.

https://phys.org/news/2019-05-corroborates-planetary-tidal-solar.html


Original Submission

Related Stories

Chemists Discover Water Microdroplets Spontaneously Produce Hydrogen Peroxide 12 comments

Water is everywhere on Earth, but maybe that just gives it more space to hide its secrets. Its latest surprise, Stanford researchers report Aug. 26 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, is that microscopic droplets of water spontaneously produce hydrogen peroxide.

The discovery could pave the way for greener ways to produce the molecule, a common bleaching agent and disinfectant, said Richard Zare, the Marguerite Blake Wilbur Professor in Natural Science and a professor of chemistry in the Stanford School of Humanities and Sciences.

"Water is one of the most commonly found materials, and it's been studied for years and years and you would think that there was nothing more to learn about this molecule. But here's yet another surprise," said Zare, who is also a member of Stanford Bio-X.

The discovery was made serendipitously while Zare and his lab were studying a new, more efficient way to create gold nanostructures in tiny water droplets known as microdroplets. To make those structures, the team added an additional molecule called a reducing agent. As a control test, Zare suggested seeing if they could create gold nanostructures without the reducing agent. Theoretically that should have been impossible, but it worked anyway—hinting at an as yet undiscovered feature of microdroplet chemistry.

https://phys.org/news/2019-08-chemists-microdroplets-spontaneously-hydrogen-peroxide.html

First astrology and now homeopathy are starting to make sense after all.

Jae Kyoo Lee el al., "Spontaneous generation of hydrogen peroxide from aqueous microdroplets", PNAS (2019). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1911883116


Original Submission

Meta: The Curious Case of the Missing Journal Entry 111 comments

What started it all:

On 2019-08-24 13:02:01 UTC an accusation (https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=33244&page=1&cid=884682#commentwrap) was made that a Journal Entry "It would have been posted before 6 hours ago" (i.e. posted at approximately 2019-08-24 07:00:00 UTC) was deleted by a member of the staff at SoylentNews. The circumstances surrounding the making of the Journal Entry are elaborated upon in this comment. (https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=33244&page=1&cid=885191#commentwrap)

I have been with this site since before it went live. Its founding principal has been the making available of a forum whereby the community can submit stories — and post comments — to predominantly tech-related items. Further, each logged-in user has been made available the ability to post entries to their Journal.

As Editor-in-Chief I took this allegation seriously and performed an independent and in-depth investigation. My findings are presented below.

Note: It is not lost on me the futility of trying to prove a negative. It is for good reason that the criminal justice system in the US is founded on the principle of "innocent until proven guilty." It is not up the the accused to vindicate themselves, but for the accuser to bring sufficient evidence to bring about conviction.

NB: In the course of writing this, I discovered a bug in how the site displays wide elements contained in an ECODE element. It incorrectly wraps the text onto the next line (leading to a jumbled mess) when it should, instead, provide horizontal scroll bars. Please accept my apologies for its current appearance.

Executive Summary:

An in-depth investigation making use of: external resources, the UI presented by SoylentNews, and ad-hoc queries of the site database (DB) failed to locate a "smoking gun", i.e. found no clear proof that a Journal Entry was posted to the site and subsequently deleted by anyone other than an author.

It is my estimation that the user submitted an entry, but the site failed to receive and save it correctly. In other words, the user tripped over some kind of bug be it in the site's code, communications between the user and the site, or something else.

Recommendation: When a user completes making a Journal Entry and submits it to the site, the code should respond by using the newly-created journal parameters in conjunction with the normal journal-loading code to present the Journal Entry to the user as confirmation that the entry was properly received and saved. That is to say, affirmative feedback of receipt, storage, and accessibility of the Journal Entry.

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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by HiThere on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:13AM (7 children)

    by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:13AM (#884530) Journal

    This seems to imply that tracking cycles should be a way to tell whether various stars have planets, and perhaps how many close in ones.

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    • (Score: 2) by Barenflimski on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:30AM (6 children)

      by Barenflimski (6836) on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:30AM (#884604)

      We need a Kepler with a staying power of +11.5 years.

      • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:48AM (5 children)

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:48AM (#884609) Journal

        TESS could last a long time, as long as its reaction wheels don't die. It has a stable orbit.

        It might be too cheap for anyone to want to service it. Starship is going to disrupt the economics of this. Maybe you can launch a very cheap robotic servicing mission for TESS, or just launch many assembly line produced space telescopes so that there is complete coverage of the night sky forever.

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        • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:05PM (4 children)

          by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:05PM (#884798) Journal

          The problem with the "many telescope" solution is that you need an overlap period that you can use to calibrate them. We've got a bad history of letting one die before the replacement is ready, and that means the measurements can't be directly compared. Better would be to keep TESS working, or something similar.

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          • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 25 2019, @09:10AM (2 children)

            by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday August 25 2019, @09:10AM (#885114) Journal

            Starship is a game changer. There will need to be major adjustments in how NASA works.

            Ultimately, I think we will see NASA launching at least 10x more probes and space telescopes for the same budget. Slash the testing periods (see JWST for how bad this can get), use a mass produced common platform for the majority of spacecraft, and just choose your instruments. Miniaturization in size and mass will not be needed, which will reduce costs. Truly gigantic space telescopes could be built with modules that dock with each other instead of fragile unfolding designs.

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            • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:38PM (1 child)

              by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Sunday August 25 2019, @06:38PM (#885292) Journal

              But you will still need to validate the readings. It's extremely important that there be overlap, or you lose a lot of certainty when you do comparisons. These are instruments working at the edge of what we can do, and while you can depend on them to be "about the same", you need to calculate correction factors by comparing them against the instruments that you've already been collecting data from.

              So keeping the tools that you've got working, working longer is a *real* benefit. Or, of course, overlapping the readings.

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              • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 25 2019, @07:23PM

                by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday August 25 2019, @07:23PM (#885323) Journal

                I would like TESS, Hubble, etc. to work indefinitely. But it remains to be seen if there is willpower to make that happen even with ultra low launch costs. TESS cost under $300 million total. What will servicing it cost (manned or robotic)?

                This is what TESS is collecting over the first two years. [wikipedia.org] There is about 8 months left. The mission will obviously be extended, but we don't know how they will choose to operate going forward. As you can see, some of the zones only get 27 days of observation time out of 2 years. So the overlap may be less important than starting fresh and getting continuous coverage of parts of the sky.

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          • (Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday August 25 2019, @09:12AM

            by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday August 25 2019, @09:12AM (#885115) Journal

            Also, killing SLS/Orion (and preventing a successor) can free up a lot of budget. Some of that might go back to manned spaceflight, but there will be more money for spamming telescopes.

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  • (Score: 4, Funny) by legont on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:16AM (9 children)

    by legont (4179) on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:16AM (#884531)

    Perhaps astrology is not that BS after all.

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    • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:11AM (2 children)

      by RS3 (6367) on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:11AM (#884556)

      Isn't astrology based on star constellations, not planets?

      • (Score: 4, Informative) by legont on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:23AM (1 child)

        by legont (4179) on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:23AM (#884564)

        My very limited understanding is that it is based on planets going into constellations which looks like a way to identify planet's positions to me.

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        "Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
        • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:54AM

          by RS3 (6367) on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:54AM (#884578)

          Oh yeah. I was never into that stuff, and it's late, and you'd think I might have Internet access and a search engine... But human interaction is better. :) Thanks. So yeah, there might be something to it after all.

          This whole thing is interesting. As a minor astrophysics enthusiast, I'm surprised I'd never heard of this tidal effect on the sun before, and maybe that's because it's a new idea, which again, I'm surprised nobody figured it out before.

          So now scientists should be able to do a better job of predicting long-term solar cycles, and due to the tides, where they will occur in relation to where Earth is in orbit, of course including the sun's rotation period of ~ 25 days.

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @05:28AM (5 children)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @05:28AM (#884585)

      My understanding was that astrology was originally used to predict climate. Essentially to tell kings what type of policies to implement. All the horoscope stuff came later. It was probably like we see today where physics used the scientific method to great success then psychologists/medical researchers, etc cargo culted them to get the prestige without the actual success, etc.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:08AM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:08AM (#884598)

        My understanding was that if you burned the planet to the ground, things would be bad. I'm glad Astrology predicted this.

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:00AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:00AM (#884612)

        By the 16th century BC the extensive employment of omen-based astrology can be evidenced in the compilation of a comprehensive reference work known as Enuma Anu Enlil. Its contents consisted of 70 cuneiform tablets comprising 7,000 celestial omens. Texts from this time also refer to an oral tradition - the origin and content of which can only be speculated upon.[16] At this time Babylonian astrology was solely mundane, concerned with the prediction of weather and political matters, and prior to the 7th century BC the practitioners' understanding of astronomy was fairly rudimentary. Astrological symbols likely represented seasonal tasks, and were used as a yearly almanac of listed activities to remind a community to do things appropriate to the season or weather (such as symbols representing times for harvesting, gathering shell-fish, fishing by net or line, sowing crops, collecting or managing water reserves, hunting, and seasonal tasks critical in ensuring the survival of children and young animals for the larger group). By the 4th century, their mathematical methods had progressed enough to calculate future planetary positions with reasonable accuracy, at which point extensive ephemerides began to appear.[17]

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_astrology [wikipedia.org]

      • (Score: 2) by HiThere on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:07PM (1 child)

        by HiThere (866) Subscriber Badge on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:07PM (#884799) Journal

        Well, even in Babylon it was used to predict other things. Like what a lucky day was for the king to change his clothes. (Considering how hot the middle east gets, the king must sometimes have gotten pretty ripe.)

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        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @05:09PM

          by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @05:09PM (#884819)

          1. You don't give a relative timeframe for that (or any source)
          2. That was probably a symbolic act indicating a change of seasons.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by takyon on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:20AM (5 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:20AM (#884560) Journal

    Find out which stars have solar cycles instead of dimming events to indirectly look for exoplanets?

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    • (Score: 3, Informative) by RS3 on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:58AM (4 children)

      by RS3 (6367) on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:58AM (#884580)

      Possibly, but the number, mass, and period of planet orbits all interact with the tidal cycles, so you wouldn't be able to back-calculate very well, but it should certainly be part of the equation now.

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Saturday August 24 2019, @05:31AM (3 children)

        by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday August 24 2019, @05:31AM (#884588) Journal

        Sure, it should be combined with other methods. But it could be used on stars that don't have dimming events that can be seen from Earth. Not sure how it would stack up against the radial velocity method.

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        • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:58PM (2 children)

          by RS3 (6367) on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:58PM (#884888)

          Absolutely agreed. :) Astrophysics is one of those hobbies I always thought I'd delve into more as I got older, but the toys (really good telescopes) have gotten much more expensive and I can't afford it. And frankly I don't have the time- too many other things to do, like read and write online! :o

          • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:27PM (1 child)

            by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:27PM (#884931)

            You can still study actual astrophysics, you'll learn a lot more than you will by just watching the sky. There are some excellent mid-level books, I was gonna go grab one of my favorite ones that is shorter and geared towards non-academics but it is in storage.

            Seriously, I recommend some light astronomy learning for everybody if only to give you knowledge of the universe and an appreciation for Sagan's quote “The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.”

            Personally I don't doubt there is other life in the universe, you'd have to be astoundingly self-centered to believe that. However I won't place bets on whether they have visited Earth ;)

            • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday August 25 2019, @03:12AM

              by RS3 (6367) on Sunday August 25 2019, @03:12AM (#885052)

              Yes, and thanks for the encouragement. Wish I knew who you were. Some ACs are really awesome here. Some I'd delete and block if I could. Frustrating not knowing who I'm writing to.

              In fact my university, as I'm sure is true of others, has an open-house every summer with quite a few telescopes on the rooftop, and many classrooms with exciting (yes, I'm a nerd) lectures, demonstrations, various presentations, etc. One I loved was "The Universe in 3D" - you'd don 3D glasses and they'd start with us and our solar system, and expand out until they covered everything known. Another was Mars rovers in 3D- you'd see Mars in 3D (from rover footage). Many on black holes, planetarium shows, exoplanets, neutron stars and X-ray bursts, etc.

              Some believe that aliens walk among us.

  • (Score: 2) by FatPhil on Saturday August 24 2019, @01:05PM (2 children)

    by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Saturday August 24 2019, @01:05PM (#884704) Homepage
    https://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=19/06/04/174239

    I seem to remember being a bit cynical in the past, but I will withhold judgement until I've delved into the paper(s), or seen a review from someone I trust. I'm wondering what he means by "observations" that go back 1000 years, for example. We didn't have any accurate measurement devices that far back, and we certainly weren't counting sunspots, for example.
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    • (Score: 4, Informative) by FatPhil on Saturday August 24 2019, @01:10PM (1 child)

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Saturday August 24 2019, @01:10PM (#884705) Homepage
      I'm impressed, apparently we have accurate records of that for over a couple of hundred years:

        Since c. 1749, continuous monthly averages of sunspot activity have been available and are shown here as reported by the Solar Influences Data Analysis Center, World Data Center for the Sunspot Index, at the Royal Observatory of Belgium. These figures are based on an average of measurements from many different observatories around the world. Prior to 1749, sporadic observations of sunspots are available. These were compiled and placed on consistent monthly framework by Hoyt & Schatten (1998a, 1998b).
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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:24PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:24PM (#884779)

    shit's totally fascinating.
    a solid permanent magnet has way more attracting force then a similar sized (and massed) object. ofc this is because the no.3 fundamental force (electromagnetism) is waaayy more strong then no.4 fundamental force (gravity).

    the other cool thing is that the sun is a ball of plasma (ionized gases), which a solid piece of magnetic iron is not.
    if the sun could be cooled down, so there's no plasma anymore, would it still have a magnetic field like a solid piece of iron (everything plus-and-minus adds up to zero)?
    so the iron is permanently magnetic whilst the sun needs some "exotic" physics and lots and lots of gravity-pressure to be so?
    the theory is that the earth is not a "solid piece of magnetic iron" but gets its magnetic field from liquid, spinning nickel-iron(?) core. so, same if we could cool down the earth enough to make it thoroughly solid, would it still exhibit a magnetic field?

    not sure where i am going with this, but ...hmmm... sun and small inner planets are coupled ... how about a scifi tv series about the project of throwing the right stuff at the right time and angle into the sun to jumpstart the old-moldy-and-going-on-a-stick magnetic field of mars back to youthful life? ^_^

    note: too bad a "earth-like" companion planet is not a requirement for a stable sun to form; would make some great extended theories ...

    • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Sunday August 25 2019, @03:37AM (2 children)

      by RS3 (6367) on Sunday August 25 2019, @03:37AM (#885059)

      Yes, it's pretty cool.

      Okay, so IIRC, gravitational force is inversely proportional to the square of the distance between the objects. But magnetic force is inversely proportional to the 4th power. So at distance X, 2 planets have have Y gravitational force, but at 2X, the force is 1/4 Y.

      With magnets, at distance 2X, you get 1/16 the force, and at 3X, you'd get 1/81 the force. (spooky music playing)

      That's why you can have a super (neodymium alloy) magnet that you can't remove from some solid piece of steel, but 1" (or 2.54 cm) away and there's barely any force.

      But look at a size-proportionate model of our solar system, and to think that things farther than Pluto are held in orbit largely by the sun's gravity is mind-numbing.

      Again, IIRC, there's theory that earth's magnetic field is being generated by the iron inner core moving around in the molten outer core, and that the magnetic field deflects the sun's solar wind, keeping our atmosphere intact. There's also theory that Mars used to have this core and magnetic field that deflected the sun's solar wind, but when Mars cooled the magnetic field mostly died and the solar wind blew Mars' atmosphere away. If all that's true, you'd have to re-heat Mars' core, and I'm good with thermodynamics but I'm not going to calculate that for free!

      • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 26 2019, @06:47PM (1 child)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday August 26 2019, @06:47PM (#885760)

        Magnetic force depends upon the geometry of the magnetic source. It is inverse-squared for a monopole. It is more like 1/r^3 for a dipole and 1/r for a long current-carrying wire. It might be 1/r^4 for an oscillating magnetic field though.

        • (Score: 2) by RS3 on Tuesday August 27 2019, @04:52AM

          by RS3 (6367) on Tuesday August 27 2019, @04:52AM (#885949)

          Thanks. I studied it in college, and had to do all the complex derivations and calculus, but have never used it since. I did look it up before posting, but whew, found a lot of theory and very complicated math. For some reason 1/r^4 has stuck in my mind. Magnetism seems like by far the most complex and non-intuitive thing I've ever studied.

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