A study published last year claiming global warming is related to the sun found errors.
Scientific reports belonging to the Nature Publishing Group found that the article's conclusion was based on an erroneous assumption.
The decision was made after strong criticism from the scientific community, which prompted the editors of the journal to further review the study.
An article titled Baseline Fluctuations of the Solar Magnetic Field and Solar Radiation on a Millennium Timeline, led by mathematician Valentina Zharkova of the University of Northumbria in the UK, was published in June 2019.
It argued that human activities were not responsible for the approximately one degree increase in global temperatures since the industrial revolution, and therefore the rapid upward trend in global temperatures, with devastating effects on communities and ecosystems around the world, is not related to human activities.
Instead, the study said the rise in temperature was associated with a change in the distance between the Earth and the Sun as the Sun moved closer to Earth.
The sun does move a little. Although our star is the most massive object in the solar system, there are many objects orbiting the sun, and collectively, they also have a fairly large mass. Thus, the true center of the solar system is the center of all its mass and has a name: barycenter.
In addition, each planet has its own center of mass between it and the Sun. When other planets revolve around the sun, they pull it a little, so the sun moves around the barycenter.
Jupiter naturally has the most impact, which is why it makes the Sun move the most. These light solar motions are called 'solar inertial motions' and are usually quite small.
In a recently withdrawn article, Zharkova argued that the movement of the Sun around the barycenters created by the gas giants was enough to change the distance between the Earth and the Sun by 3 million kilometers over several hundred years.
Catocala Formosana / PubPee
But, as other scientists quickly noticed, the Earth does not revolve around these barycenters. It revolves around the sun. Thus, its average distance from the Sun remains fairly constant over short time scales.
Changes are now taking place in the relation of the Earth to the Sun. Disturbances from other planets alter the eccentricity of the Earth's orbit, its axial tilt, and its precession. These regular changes are called Milankovitch cycles, and they occur over tens of thousands of years.
The current rate of global warming simply cannot be explained by such a gradual change in orbit.
This problem is not the only one, but it was a sufficient reason for the withdrawal. In the disclaimer attached to the paper, the editors of Scientific Reports explained:
Since publication, concerns have been raised about the interpretation of how the distance between the Earth and the Sun changes over time, and that some of the assumptions underlying the analysis presented in the article are incorrect.
The analysis presented in this section is based on the assumption that the orbits of the Earth and the Sun relative to the barycenter of the Solar System are not correlated, so the Earth-Sun distance changes by an amount comparable to the distance between the Sun and the barycenter.
An expert review published after publication showed that this assumption is inaccurate, since the motions of the Earth and the Sun are mainly related to Jupiter and other giant planets, which accelerate the Earth and the Sun in almost the same direction and thus generate correlated motions in Earth and Sun. Current ephemeris calculations show that the distance from the Earth to the Sun changes several times less over several centuries.
As a result, editors are no longer confident in the findings presented.
