General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology, abstract
gr-qc/0602003

From: Antonio F. Ranada [view email]

Date: Wed, 1 Feb 2006 15:30:16 GMT (10kb)

A model for the Pioneer Anomaly

Authors: Antonio F. Ranada, Alfredo Tiemblo

Comments: 11 pages, no figures

We propose an explanation to the Pioneer Anomaly, the anomalous blueshift in the radio signals from the Pioneer 10/11 spacecrafts that remains unexplained 30 years after being discovered by a NASA team around 1975. It was detected as a Doppler shift that does not correspond to any known motion of the ships. In 1998, after many unsuccessful efforts to account for it, the discoverers suggested "the possibility that the origin of the anomalous signal is new physics". We show here that the phenomenon has the same observational footprint as an acceleration of the atomic clocks time with respect to the astronomical time. Surprisingly, this curious new idea turns out to be compatible with current physics; lacking a unified theory of quantum physics and gravitation, we cannot discard it a priori. We expound a mechanism that produces such an acceleration as a result of the coupling of the background gravitation and the quantum vacuum. This suggests a solution to the riddle, in which the velocity of a receding ship, as deduced from the Doppler effect, is smaller than the value predicted by the standard theory of gravitation. We conclude that the Pioneer Anomaly is probably the signature of the difference between the marches of the astronomical clock of the orbit and the atomic clock inside the ship.

http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0602003