From: Amara Graps (Amara.Graps@mpi-hd.mpg.de)
Date: Fri Oct 01 1999 - 01:28:58 MDT
Patrick Wilken (patrickw@cs.monash.edu.au) Thu, 30 Sep 1999 16:00:31
wrote:
>This is a more mundane and reasonble explanation that was published
>on the BBC website a few days ago:
>Tuesday, September 28, 1999 Published at 21:23 GMT 22:23 UK
>Old spacecraft makes surprise discovery
There's more explanations about the Pioneer 10 anomalous acceleration.
It's a really active area of research. I would be skeptical of press
releases until there's more work done, and then confirmations.
This last Spring, our group had some contact with an Austrailian
physicist that believes that the intervening interplanetary dust could
have a role in causing the Pioneer 10 anomalous acceleration. The
paper was submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett. and you can get it on the
astro-ph server:
http://xxx.uni-augsburg.de/abs/astro-ph/9904150
Here is the abstract.
Amara
--------------------------------------------------------------
Authors: David F. Crawford (University of Sydney)
Comments: 3 pages, submitted to Phys. Rev. Lett
The reported anomalous acceleration of the Pioneer 10 spacecraft
of -8.5X10^{-10} m/s^2 (i.e. towards the sun) can be explained
by a gravitational interaction on the S-band signals traveling
between Pioneer 10 and the earth. The effect of this gravitational
interaction is a frequency shift that is proportional to the distance
and the square root of the density of the medium in which it
travels. If changes in this frequency are interpreted as a Doppler
shift the result is an apparent acceleration directed towards the
sun. The gravitational interaction is caused by the focusing of the
signal photons in curved space where in this case the curvature is
related by the density of the interplanetary dust.
--
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Amara Graps | Max-Planck-Institut fuer Kernphysik
Interplanetary Dust Group | Saupfercheckweg 1
+49-6221-516-543 | 69117 Heidelberg, GERMANY
Amara.Graps@mpi-hd.mpg.de * http://galileo.mpi-hd.mpg.de/~graps
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"Never fight an inanimate object." - P. J. O'Rourke
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