The Pioneer anomaly - that is, the mysterious drift of unmanned stations launched by NASA toward the edges of the solar system - cannot be explained by any modification of the laws of gravity. This conclusion follows from a new work published by Norwegian physicists. As a factor influencing the unusual behavior of spaceships, the authors of the most authoritative studies on this topic prefer to consider some more familiar forces, despite the fact that the specific causes of the anomaly have not yet been clarified. However, not all scientists agree with this position.
The automatic interplanetary stations Pioneer-10 and Pioneer-11 were launched in 1972 to explore Jupiter and Saturn. They did an excellent job with their mission and fully met the expectations of their designers, going further to the stars (in opposite directions). The last bits of data from Pioneer 10 were received in early 2003 after more than 30 years of continuous operation. At that moment, this spacecraft was already 12 billion kilometers from the Sun. Now "Pioneer-10", with which it is no longer possible to contact, continues to move towards the star Aldebaran (the red giant from the constellation Taurus), taking with it its secrets. According to experts, it will reach the vicinity of this star in 2 million years.
The surprise was caused by the fact that as soon as the "Pioneers" passed the orbit of Uranus, the radio signals sent back to Earth from the aging probes began to change - unpredictably shifted to the short-wave part of the spectrum (which is equivalent to the action of an additional unaccounted for force (in addition to solar gravity), which causes deceleration and acting towards the Sun or towards the Earth). This as yet unambiguously unexplained phenomenon, first noted in 1980, haunts astrophysicists and space navigation specialists.
From an everyday point of view, the effect, of course, seems to be a trifle - it is 10 billion times less than the acceleration that we experience from the Earth's gravitational field (aP = (8.74 ± 1.33) x 10-10 m / s2) … The most commonplace explanations for the mysterious phenomenon could be, for example, the leakage of residual gaseous fuel from low-thrust engines, braking on cosmic dust particles, asymmetric infrared radiation from small non-cooled remote nuclear reactors (RTGs) installed on board the Pioneers, etc. However, some scientists are wondering whether the "Pioneer" anomaly can be generated by some hitherto unknown factors that operate only outside the solar system. Even models involving antimatter, dark matter and dark energy have been considered.
Kjell Tangen, a physicist working for DNV (Norway), comprehensively analyzed the situation and came to the conclusion that none of the known modifications of the law of gravity can describe the anomaly, since at the same time it is necessary to correctly describe the behavior of outer planets Solar system (publication of the corresponding article is expected in the scientific journal Physical Review D, but for now it can be found on the website arXiv.org). When changing the gravitational component in ways that would provide an explanation for the anomaly of the "Pioneers", Tangen inevitably received incorrect results for describing the motion of Uranus and Pluto (Neptune was an exception in this sense).
There is, however, an opinion that for the sake of explaining the newly discovered effect, something more could be sacrificed - for example, one of the foundations of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity - the principle of equivalence, which Tangen did not encroach on in his calculations. As an option: objects, which are acted upon by the force of gravity, according to the so-called modified inertia theory, can accelerate in different ways depending on their past trajectories …
A certain hope that the Pioneers' mystery will finally be solved is connected with the work of the group of Vyacheslav Turyshev, a graduate of the Physics Department of Moscow State University, now working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena. Relatively recently, it was possible to obtain miraculously preserved additional data from the Pioneers, which were previously inaccessible due to archaic file formats and information carriers. Now there is a thorough analysis of these data, including information about the operation of the "filling" of automatic stations, including the temperature regime of the "main suspects" - RTGs. In addition, the group acquired a copy of the twin satellites kept in the museum - the third "Pioneer" left on Earth after pre-flight tests, which allowed selecting the highest quality parts for space.
In the report read by Vyacheslav Turyshev in February within the framework of the conference "Sagitov Readings - 2007" (GAISH), the possibility was stipulated that the new data would make it possible to clarify the direction of acceleration experienced by the vehicles. If it is directed not towards the Sun, but towards the Earth, then it will be possible to talk about the effects associated exclusively with the receiving equipment.
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It is interesting that the very detection of the anomaly became possible almost by accident, thanks to a special simplified design of the orientation system of the Pioneers (repeating the signal received from the Earth), but the more advanced Voyagers, Cassini and New Horizons, which, after the Pioneers "Also set off on a long journey to conquer the far reaches of the solar system, in fact, they can neither confirm nor deny the results of the well-deserved" oldies "…