Tuesday, the Planet Venus will pass directly between the Sun and the Earth – scientists around the world will be gathering data – mostly to assist on being able to look for planets that orbit other distant stars and cause very tiny changes to the light that reaches Earth from those far away stars.
http://www.transitofvenus.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Venus
Venus will cross into the path of the sun at 6:04 PM (EDT) on Tuesday (don’t look at the sun!) Compared to the sun, Venus is a tiny speck. This transit is important because the orbit of Venus is inclined about 3 degrees from Earth’s orbit, and the length it takes the Earth and Venus to return to the same relative position takes 243 years. When the two planets are in the right relative position, there is a transit usually followed by another 8 years later – then it is another gap of 121 or 105 years.
German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler had figured out enough about planetary motion that he predicted the transits of Venus in 1631 and 1639 (Kepler died in 1630). Kepler struggled with trying to reconcile what the math and physics were telling him with his belief in God, and coping with the dangers of not wanting to anger the Catholic church – his mother at one point was accused of being a witch.
Eventually figuring out that planets orbit the sun in an ellipse with the sun at one of the focal points – everything started to fall into place. While Copernicus had correctly realized the Earth orbits the sun, and it wasn’t the Sun orbiting the Earth once a year, he believed the orbits of the planets were circular. Kepler was trying to determine why orbits were not lining up properly and realized that orbits of planets are elliptical, not a perfect round circle operating in the same plane and that the Sun is not at the center of the solar system, but at a focal point of the elliptical orbits.
While astronomers knew the relative distances between the planets by 1639, they didn’t have an accurate measure of the average distance from the Earth to the Sun is (called an Astronomical Unit – or AU). After missing the transit in 1631 (it wasn’t visible in Europe and nobody was watching for it on other parts of the planet), the 1639 event predicted by Kepler gave a close estimate of the distance – some small details still unknown at that time made the result slightly inaccurate. By 1761 and 1769, the ability to move around the planet and to keep accurate time had improved to the point that a much better number was calculated (still about 3% inaccurate)
The center of mass of the solar system moves around some. The motion of the center of mass is limited by the huge mass of the sun, but as the planets revolve around the sun their collective mass will move the center of mass a little. Therefore, depending on the changing distribution of the planets around the sun, the solar system center of mass will correspondingly steadily move; sometimes the solar center of mass is within the sun, and sometimes it is just outside the surface of the sun.
A few decades ago a Russian astrophysicist studied the “rosette” like pattern of the motion of the solar system’s center of mass over several thousand years. He discerned various repetitive patterns, with different periods, to the center of mass motion. He did correlations with various earth based measurements and found a very strong correlation between certain center of mass motion patterns and the measured global temperature.
It is not hard to imagine that the sun’s nuclear reactions and internal flow patterns are affected by the location of the solar system’s center of mass (imagine what earthly processes might be affected if the center of mass of the earth was moving around; mostly located somewhere inside the earth , but sometimes located just outside the surface of the earth). He theorized that when the center of mass remains mostly inside the sun for a long period; the solar nuclear reaction is more stable, there are more sun spots (indicative of greater solar nuclear activity), and the measured global temperature is higher. But, when the center of mass motion spends substantial time outside of the sun’s surface he theorized the solar nuclear reaction and flow patterns are disturbed to a degree, there are few sun spots (lesser solar activity), and the measured global temperature is lower.
For the next decades his data predict a noticeable decrease in global temperature.
There isn’t enough data to confidently state whether the coming cool period will be a Maunder Minimum kind of cooling (Little Ice Age of the late 17th and early 18th century) or a full blown Ice Age (a layer of ice hundreds of feet thick over most of the world land mass). Current scientific guesses argue for a Maunder Minimum kind of cooling.
Add one more serious cultural stress (potential famine) to the numerous upcoming stressors we already obsess about.
Someone should tell Algore.
AlGore already knows – his interests are strictly based on money is the supposed lucrative carbon trading market. He couldn’t care less about the truth, he wants to be a billionaire.
This has been a magnificent show. I’ve been working on filters and screens for my cameras and telescopes for quite some time. Today I was agitated and excited, had all my corners covered, except the weather in god-forsaken-hillbilly-hell Pittsburgh. The best plans of mice and men…
Thanks f to the folks of W.M. Keck Observatory streaming from Hawaii I don’t have to commit harakiri. I think I am moving to the Canary Islands.