The 11 year Sun Spot Cycle, presented in the textbook is correct. There is a cycle of Sun Spots, measured since the nineteenth century, which is still not fully explained. It has to do with magnetic fields, the organizing force I told you about yesterday. Heat is disorganized motion, if you have a magnetic field, the temperature, which is a measure of heat, goes down. Sun Spots represent organized motion of the plasma particles in the photosphere of stars. We saw a picture of a line of light going out from one Sun Spot, and going down another Sun Spot. Those electromagnetic processes determine the 11 year Sun Spot Cycle, but obviously not completely; if that was the end of the story, there would not be a mystery in this 11 year cycle.
Now I find out that Xavier Dumusque, has pioneered the use of these difficult effects to disentangle the signal for the first extrasolar planet, with a back and forth velocity of
I hope you do not get confused by all this. The right answer is 11 years, nevertheless, as the note I posted before indicates, some people think that Jupiter, and Saturn, have strong magnetic fields, which may interact with the Sun magnetic field to produce other cycles, maybe 17 years, as Louis said yesterday.
BTW, the December 21, 2012, "prediction", is accompanied by a longer than usual Sun Spot Cycle, this time.
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