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THE SUN'S "MYSTERIOUS" 6°OR 7°AXIAL TILT
Dear friends,
As mentioned in Chapter12 of my "Tychos" book (2018), astronomers are still today totally baffled as to why the Sun's axis appears to be tilted at 6° or 7°degrees. You may wonder why there's still no firm consensus among academics about this tilt (is it 6° or 7°?), but then again, the science of astronomy is what it is: a big mess. Hence, allow me henceforth use primarily the higher figure of 7°for the purposes of this short exposé - and in the interest of clarity.
Make no mistake: the observable fact that the Sun's axis is tilted at an angle (with respect to the entire Solar System's plane) is no petty matter. For why would this be? Isn't the Sun supposed to be the "central driveshaft" of our system? Shouldn't therefore all our planets (including Earth) be neatly revolving around the plane of the Sun's equator? Well, they don't. And this fact is an absolute mystery for academic astronomy or, in other words, a still unresolved quandary which - all by itself - falsifies Newton's sacrosanct gravitational "laws". As recently as 2016, an academic study admitted that it's
"such a deep-rooted mystery and so difficult to explain that people just don't talk about it". The study went on bizarelly speculating that this tilt of our Sun's axis might be caused by what they call "Planet Nine" (a hitherto unseen / entirely hypothetical celestial body...) :
"All of the planets orbit in a flat plane with respect to the sun, roughly within a couple degrees of each other. That plane, however, rotates at a six-degree tilt with respect to the sun—giving the appearance that the sun itself is cocked off at an angle. Until now, no one had found a compelling explanation to produce such an effect.
"It's such a deep-rooted mystery and so difficult to explain that people just don't talk about it," says Brown, the Richard and Barbara Rosenberg Professor of Planetary Astronomy.
Brown and Batygin's discovery of evidence that the sun is orbited by an as-yet-unseen planet—that is about 10 times the size of Earth with an orbit that is about 20 times farther from the sun on average than Neptune's—changes the physics. Planet Nine, based on their calculations, appears to orbit at about 30 degrees off from the other planets' orbital plane—in the process, influencing the orbit of a large population of objects in the Kuiper Belt, which is how Brown and Batygin came to suspect a planet existed there in the first place."
Source:
https://phys.org/news/2016-10-curious-t ... t.html#jCp
It bears mentioning that this "deep-rooted mystery" has been around for about 400 years - ever since Cristoph Scheiner published (back in 1630) his massive treatise "Rosa Ursina", where he described and illustrated his meticulous observations of the sunspots. Here's one of Scheiner's drawings showing how (a pair of) sunspots could be seen moving around the solar sphere in the month of March:
Now, please realize that what I have marked as a 23°tilt is just due to our own Earth's axial tilt. What concerns us here - in this particular analysis - is the tilt marked by my yellow arrows (and blue arcs). It's hard to make out exactly what amount of tilt they show, but they certainly indicate that the Sun's South Pole (in the month of March) tilts TOWARDS us earthly observers. And, in fact:
"The Sun's axis tilts almost 7.5 degrees out of perpendicular to Earth's orbital plane. (The orbital plane of Earth is commonly called the ecliptic.) Therefore, as we orbit the Sun, there's one day out of the year when the Sun's North Pole tips most toward Earth. This happens at the end of the first week in September. Six months later,
at the end of the first week in March, it's the Sun's South Pole that tilts maximumly towards Earth."
Source:
https://www.tychos.info/citation/057B_T ... s-Axis.htm
So far so good. We know that the Sun's South pole tilts towards us in March - and away from us in September. We may now wonder how the Sun is tilted in the months of December and June. Well, we may once again use Cristoph Scheiner's old observations to answer this question. Here's how Scheiner saw and graphically documented the sunspots' angular motions in January and July:
(Note that if Scheiner had observed those sunspots in December and June - rather than in January and July - he might have recorded a 7° tilt instead of a 6° tilt.)
Well, ladies and gents, here's when I will humbly - yet proudly - present the results of my own efforts at understanding this "mysterious" 7° tilt of the Sun's axis.
Firstly, you'll need to know about the perceived tilts (as seen from Earth) of the orbits of Venus and Mercury. Officially, their orbits are tilted as follows:
Orbital tilt of VENUS: 3.4°
Orbital tilt of MERCURY: 7°
In my Tychos book I stated that Venus and Mercury are the two moons of the Sun - rather than two "planets" (as they are currently called) revolving around the Sun - much like our own planet Earth is supposed to do. In fact, I had also (intuitively) envisioned that these tilts were correlated with the Sun's
"mysterious 7°tilt that no one likes to talk about". Well, it is one thing to intuitively claim something - but is quite another matter to prove it. So here we go: in the last few weeks, I have been doggedly refining the settings (for Venus & Mercury) in the Tychosium3D simulator. As I finally achieved a satisfactory "balance" of their orbital motions (which proceed at constant speeds and around perfectly circular, non-elliptical orbits), I was marvelled to find - at the end of my toggling of the Tychosium's data settings - that their orbits are, in fact, tilted in similar fashion as the Sun's axial tilt! When viewed from a given angle, this common tilt (of the Sun's axis and its two moons, Venus & Mercury) remains almost perfectly constant, century after century.
Here's how the Sun's axis and its two moons (Venus & Mercury) are tilted in June and December:
And here's how the Sun's axis and its two moons (Venus & Mercury) are tilted in March and September:
As you can see, the orbital tilts of Venus & Mercury (the Sun's two moons, according to the Tychos model) are firmly "locked", at all times, to the Sun's axial tilt.
One could hardly wish for a better indication in support of the contention that Venus and Mercury are the two lunar satellites of the Sun.
You may now ask: "why is the orbit of Venus reckoned to be tilted at 3.4° whereas the orbit of Mercury is reckoned to be tilted at 7°? Well, the answer is simple. The astute observer perusing the
Tychosium simulator will readily notice that Mercury's orbital tilt bobs "from side to side" (or "up and down") as it revolves around the Sun and returns to perigee (i.e.closest to Earth) in only 116.88 days, whereas Venus revolves around the Sun far slower, returning to perigee in 584.4 days. Consequently, the observed orbital tilts of Venus and Mercury are recorded as being 3.4°versus 7° - yet it has never occurred to anyone that these tilts are intimately correlated to the Sun's axial tilt of 7°.
As I like to say, the Tychos is here to stay.
) by orienting the Tychosium 3D-view as shown in my below screenshot of the simulator (remember to activate the trace function for Mars in the "TRACE" menu). For the below screenshot, I chose the date 2003-08-28 which featured the closest Mars opposition of the last 60,000 years... a quite exceptional event: Mars passed as close to Earth as 0.37AU) :
And yes, it's high time to bring in the clockmakers!
