Sun's 11 year cycle of activity is shaped by the gravitational pull of Venus, Earth, and Jupiter lining up - and they shift our star's plasma by just ONE MILLIMETRE, experts say
- Gravitational pull of the three planets combines to pull on the sun's material
- Causes a tiny disturbance in the plasma by as little as just one millimetre
- 11-year cycle of the sun's activity matches up well with the 11.07 year event of the three planets aligning in a specific way
The sun's mysterious 11-year cycle of activity has a huge impact on our planet and scientists now say it may be triggered by the alignment of three planets.
Analysis of a thousand years of planetary data revealed that the gravitational forces of Venus, Earth and Jupiter combine once every 11.07 years.
This increased tug on the sun causes the material under its surface - known as plasma - to be moved by as little as one millimetre and kick-starts its next phase.
This planetary alignment and the sun's cycle marry up remarkably well and could be behind the previously unexplained phenomenon.
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The sun's mysterious 11-year cycle of activity has a huge impact on our planet and may be triggered by the rare alignment of three planets - Venus< Earth and Jupiter. The combined tug causes the material under its surface to be moved by as little as one millimetre, researchers claim, and kick-starts the next phase (file photo)
Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, a German Institute studied the effect of gravity on the sun and found it acts in a similar way to how the moon alters tides on Earth.
Lead author Frank Stefani said of the research published in the journal Solar Physics: 'There is an astonishingly high level of concordance.
'What we see is complete parallelism with the planets over the course of 90 cycles. Everything points to a clocked process.
'When I first read about ideas linking the solar dynamo to planets, I was very sceptical.
'But when we discovered the current-driven Tayler instability undergoing helicity oscillations in our computer simulations, I asked myself: "What would happen if the plasma was impacted on by a small, tidal-like perturbation?" The result was phenomenal.'
Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf, a German Institute studied the effect of gravity on the sun and found it acts in a similar way to how the moon alters tides on Earth (stock)
Experts found the material under the sun's surface was displaced by just one millimetre and this causes 'sloshing' on an enormous scale.
'There is a little bit of sloshing or changing of the direction of the rotation of the plasma,' Dr Stefani added.
This causes a small force which suddenly changes the solar plasma's movement and flips it from flowing from clockwise to anticlockwise in a corkscrew motion, or vice versa.
It is this change that marks the changeover to the next phase of the solar cycle.
Not all scientists are convinced by the elaborate theory to explain the sun's mysterious behaviour.
'The circulation in the sun is of the order of half a kilometre per second, cells move up and down within the sun that are the size of Texas,' Leif Svalgaard at Stanford University told New Scientist.
'Imagine that being influenced by a millimetre-sized tidal effect.'
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