Abstract
There is an empirical function of the heights of tides on the Sun produced by Venus, Earth, and Jupiter whose period is nearly equal to that of the 11-yr sunspot cycle (Wood, 1972). This period match has been used in suggestions that planetary tides cause sunspots and, indirectly, terrestrial climate changes and earthquakes. We derive the period of the tidal function in terms of the planetary orbital periods and show that it is artificially lengthened by aliasing. Furthermore, there exists a class of functions whose measure in frequency space is so great that, in the absence of a physical justification for preferring one member, no statistically significant period match can possibly be made with current sunspot data.
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Condon, J.J., Schmidt, R.R. Planetary tides and sunspot cycles. Sol Phys 42, 529–532 (1975). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00149930
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00149930