[blam]

I wonder how many people under thirty even know the Pioneers are still out there?

[cynicom]

I hope you were not expecting a serious, intellectual discussion on FR with your post. As you can see it rarely happens.

[parsifal]

IMHO, it's due to static electricity. As the satellites run along, they bump into stray atom-thingies and pull off electrons from their metal body. This tends to make the satellite positively charged. The ether-like-stuff around it and the negatively charged ELM field exert a pull, much a like a rubbed balloon is pulled toward a wall. Why don't JPL and NASA just call me when they have these problems? parsy the pseudo-physicist.

[Dec31,1999]

Researchers say Pioneer 10, which took the first close-up pictures of Jupiter before leaving our solar system in 1983, is being pulled back to the sun by an unknown force. The effect shows no sign of getting weaker as the spacecraft travels deeper into space, and scientists are considering the possibility that the probe has revealed a new force of nature.

Interesting article. Thanks for posting it.

[MissAmericanPie]

This article sounds like we are in some kind of protective bubble with a slightly thick invisible shell, a firmament of some kind. kewl

[FreePaul]

Reminds me of a pseudo science all fiction movie I saw many years ago. After the space ship was pulled off course for most of the movie one of the "scientists" remembered that "large objects attract smaller objects". Problem solved and the journey was peacefull ever after.

[AmerRepb]

The interstellar cloud complex around the sun is sweeping past the solar system in a direction roughly perpendicular to the sun’s movement with respect to the local solar neighborhood. The result of these two motions is that we observe interstellar material flowing toward the sun at about 26 kilometers per second from a direction close to the plane of the ecliptic and within about 15 degrees of the center of the galaxy. Because this material flows through the solar system, it has been dubbed the Local Interstellar Wind.

As interstellar atoms are ionized, they are “picked up” by the solar wind plasma and swept out to the heliosphere’s termination shock. Since these pickup ions are products of the interaction between the solar wind and the neutral atoms of the interstellar medium.

There, a small percentage of these ions are accelerated to cosmic ray energies and then propagate back into the inner heliosphere where they are observed as "anomalous cosmic rays." This process has recently been confirmed by the observervation on AMPTE and Ulysses that anomalous cosmic rays are, indeed, singly ionized

These anomalous cosmic rays return to the inner solar system where some are captured by the earth’s magnetosphere. In other words, these particles zip back and forth through the heliosphere: They are blown into the solar system as interstellar neutral atoms, blown out to the termination shock as pickup ions and then returned to the inner solar system as anomalous cosmic rays.

The elemental composition of interstellar clouds is much like that of the sun, about 90 percent hydrogen and 9.99 percent helium. The heavier elements make up the remaining 0.01 percent.

The heliosphere is probably well represented as stagnation point flow occuring between the solar wind and an interstellar wind. The resulting configuration is similar to the Earth's magnetosphere. Inside the heliopause, the solar wind passes through a termination shock that is elongated in the downstream direction and which is moving back and forth at speeds up to 100 km/s.

Now we know that there must be an outside force acting on Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11. Are the two Voyageer probes experiencing the same phenomena? I noticed that the Ulysses and Galeleo are also experiencing the same behavior . I think the chaos theory comes into play right about now.

Gotta get some shut eye. Let me know if you hear of anything else pertaining to this.

[dead]

Bump! Interesting stuff.

Has Nasa adjusted their data to account for Oprah's recent weight gain?

[editor-surveyor]

It must be the Romulan space garbage barrier. - They've got us fenced in !!

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

Perhaps it is having trouble making its way through all that pesky dark matter.

[Selara]

After reading this article, I immediatly thought of theologian, C. S. Lewis' speculations that our planet and solar system was under "quarantine" because of sin.

He put forth this speculation in the Perelandra trilogy. Very interesting.

[ChadGore]

They prolly didn't put any muffler bearings in the headlight fluid.

[VOA]

bump

[apochromat]

There's a very simple concept that could explain this effect. Instead of the curvature of space being perfectly smooth, it could have a quantized "curvature". Consider a diagonal line as representing a very small portion of the classical gravity curve, while a staircase line that is centered over the diagonal line represents the quantum version. The integral of the two lines is equivalent to gravitational potential and, in the limit, is the same for both lines. Where the staircase line is below the diagonal line, the pull of quantum gravity is greater than the classical gravity pull. The steps become wider as the curve flattens with increasing distance from the source of gravity, and so the discrepancy between pulls becomes more evident as Pioneer spends a greater amount of time within a single tread. At the interections of the two lines, the discrepancy effect reverses. In this scenario, Pioneer is apparently at a region where the quantum pull is greater than the classical pull.

The staircase would eventually meet the last, topmost tread where, in order to maintain the same integral volume, the classical pull would be slightly greater than the quantum pull. This quantum limit effect would isolate the effect of gravity to a finite region surrounded by the last tread.

The concept could also explain the acceleration of expansion in the universe, for as various gravitational subsystems, such as solar systems and galaxies, converge within gradually smaller regions, the size of the topmost tread regions becomes greater. In this way, the effect of gravity is increased within the gravitational subsystems, and it is decreased outside of them.