A recent topic of conversation involved the wobbles that various
objects in the solar system see related to the orbits of their moons
(or planets).

It's not exactly true the earth orbits the sun. The earth-moon system
orbits the sun-system and these dynamical points are not the same as
the centres of the relevant bodies. The difference creates various
gyrations that might be viewed as pseudo-random noise. It's that kind
of property that enables some s/w to track the influence of one thing
on another. The mental model of noise is "fingerprint".

So if the sun is gyrating about the solar system barycentre and the
earth is gyrating around the earth-moon barycentre and other planets
are doing the same, can we use that to predict anything?

Well. Of course.

And it will probably blow a few minds to discover long-assumed-junk
actually has some use. And it should teach us all that no matter how
crazy some idea sounds it can't be dismissed out of hand. I like to
think I take the crazier ideas, grade them as "maybe possible", and
put them on the back-burner until I suddenly find myself stuck with
some problem and discover they may have an application after all.

My mother was at one point very involved in astrology. Sometimes -- I
don't know whether anyone here has this kind of experience -- your old
mother used to prattle on about stuff that sounded like total garbage.
Of course -- well, if you were a polite child -- you never told your
mother that. Sometimes if you had some computing equipment available
(and in the 70s I had bought a brand new computer with 20K of memory!)
you might even persist and help them create some tables to help them
with their own studies of (whatever). :)

So it was with interest some decades later to listen to one of the AI
programs prattle on -- they tend to send me email every now and then
telling me of some latest discovery they think I might be interested
in -- about how Jupiter seemed to affect the earth's weather. At least
that. Specifically, they showed me the cycle of La Nina and El Nino
-- cooling and warming of the ocean in the equatorial E Pacific --
seemed to be linked. Until this time I had never heard a real
explanation of the cycle and the best anyone seemed have come up with
before then was a phase-lock on the solar cycle. But no-one had
seriously proven much.

I looked at the data the s/w came up with and it looked solid. So
just in case this was a new discovery I googled it and SURPRISE within
the prev 1-2 years someone had actually written up their own discovery
of the link. Jupiter did control a major factor of earth's weather.

Now with these barycentre wobbles we might expect other planets may be
responsible for things that hitherto had appeared to be "random" to a
lot of people. But again we can throw that to the AI programs and see
if they can come up with something that seemed to be plausibly along a
causal chain and involving various planets and their wobbles.

The "wobble" can be derived as the difference between a planet and
the barycentre of the planet and its moons. This difference may be
tiny -- in the case of the sun it's around .001 AU a lot of the time
-- but given enough data it should be detectable.

And that's what the s/w came up with. The wobbles in many planets seem
to show up in various other things. Essentially those planets are
sending the earth some gravity waves. Tiny gravity waves. But given
the antenna is the earth and not just some hunk of expensive science
junk only a few km long there is actually a good chance they will be
easily detected. :)

The first thing the programs spat out is earthquakes. It seems (in
this case) major earthquakes around the world have the "fingerprints"
of a whole slew of our planetary neighbours. Let's say for now the
mechanism involves gravity and wobbles of the sun or Jupiter just
cause a variation in the relevant tidal forces on the earth, and this
slow shaking is what might cause the odd extra quake or 2, especially
given we can average the effect of dozens of events to filter out some
of the noise.

The problem may come when it turns out even Pluto (+ Charon +
whatever) also seems to be affecting earthquake patterns. Hard to
imaging small wobbles in a minor body WAY out there can cause a
landslip anywhere. But, of course, there is more than the one way the
information can get from Pluto to here and imprint itself on quake patterns.

For now let's just look at the list of things the s/w found:

Var Body What Lat Lag R2
deldot sol mag 40 9 0.76126344
delta sol num -30 1 0.24191222
deldot neptune num -30 8 0.23306953
deldot pluto num -30 9 0.22839507
delta neptune num -30 5 0.22365127
delta uranus num -30 4 0.21392273
deldot uranus num -30 7 0.21163498
delta pluto num -10 1 0.20480234
delta saturn num -30 7 0.17606541
deldot saturn num -30 6 0.17031617
delta mars num 0 10 0.13853903
deldot jupiter num -30 0 0.12861096
delta mercury num 0 0 0.12618153
deldot venus num -30 2 0.12102921
deldot mercury num 0 5 0.10986118
delta jupiter num -30 2 0.10521226
delta venus num -30 7 0.09738810
deldot mars num -30 1 0.09506057

The "Var" column says whether the "wobble" was in the relative
positions of the earth and the body, or was in the change in rel
position (i.e. velocity).

Body lists which planet was involved in the quake-inducing influence.

The "What" column says whether the influence was seen in the monthly
number of quakes (the quake data is all for major quakes >= mag 5) or
the average magnitude of the monthly quakes.

The "Lat" gives the latitude band being considered. Bands are from the
given number to that value + 10 deg.

The "Lag" gives the number of months later the maximum effect seems to
be detected.

And the "R2" column shows what fraction of month-to-month variations
in quakes on the given lat band are "explained" by the relevant wobble.

All these links are determined by a robust stat program that checked 2
different ways whether the relationship was stronger than could be
explained by luck alone. Each test said there was less than 10% prob
the observed pattern could happen just by random chance. Together they
2 argue there is less than 1 chance in 10,000 (or maybe 1 chance in
1,000 since the tests are not always totally independent in a
statistical sense) it is just luck.

The amazing thing -- the first line says just the movement of the sun
around the system barycentre and the earth around its barycentre with
the moon can predict up to 80% of major earthquakes 9 months ahead of
time around Lat 40N where the majority of big cities are roughly located.

The even more amazing finding seems to be the motions of most planets
can do a reasonable job in predicting quakes, too. Some of that may
be related to their relative positions from their local barycentres,
while Mercury appearing on the list may be the odd guy out because
it's probably only really referring to the movement of the earth about
the earth/moon barycentre since it doesn't have any significant moons
of its own to "wobble" about its orbit. Of course there is always the
relativistic effect of its orbital precession. That might be why
Mercury is on the list.

So it seems there is a least the start of a case that the motions of
many of the planets and the sun seem to jerk the earth around just
enough over periods as small as several months to produce observable effects.

--
"Nothing in life is to be feared, it is only to be understood.
Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less."
- Marie Curie

DoD to re-investigate 1945 crash of mysterious 'avocado-shaped' UFO
Daily Mail, 29 Dec 2022 13:34Z
President Biden signed into law a new military spending bill that was
amended to incorporate a UFO case from 1945.

Flying saucers in France: A history of UFO sightings
Complete France, 22 Dec 2022
The truth is out there somewhere, but only the French are still
searching for it - the French state even has a team of UFO ...

Orb-like UFOs spotted `flying in formation' over US countryside in
videos taken miles apart sparking police probe
The Sun, 20 Dec 2022 09:58Z
ORB-LIKE UFOs have been spotted "flying in formation" over the US
countryside miles apart - reportedly sparking a police probe. Footage
showed mysterious bright white lights ...

DoD Reveals Pentagon Is Investigating 'Hundreds' Of UFO's Displaying
'Interesting Flight Dynamics'
radaronline, 18 Dec 2022 0:17Z
Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick added they've been working with the Federal
Aviation Administration, NASA and others on the study.

Pentagon has received 'several hundreds' of UFO reports, none of
extraterrestrial origin so far
Fox News, 17 Dec 2022 18:35Z
Officials with the Pentagon's All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office told
reporters on Fri that the office had received "several hundreds" of
new reports...

`Several hundred' UFO reports received by Pentagon's new tracking office
Republic World, 17 Dec 2022 09:28Z
A new Pentagon office has been set up to track reports on unidentified
flying objects (UFOs) and has received "several hundreds" of new
reports.
[Some reports involve UFO's seen "in space"].