General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology, abstract
gr-qc/0601055

From: Lorenzo Iorio [view email]

Date (v1): Sat, 14 Jan 2006 16:11:23 GMT (36kb)
Date (revised v2): Fri, 20 Jan 2006 16:04:50 GMT (37kb)
Date (revised v3): Mon, 13 Feb 2006 16:40:21 GMT (38kb)
Date (revised v4): Sat, 1 Apr 2006 15:06:33 GMT (79kb)

What do the orbital motions of the outer planets of the Solar System tell us about the Pioneer anomaly?

Authors: Lorenzo Iorio, Giuseppe Giudice

Comments: Latex2e, 19 pages, 3 tables, 10 figures, 18 references. Authorship changed; new figures added for a direct comparison with the observable quantities. Accepted for publication in New Astronomy

Subj-class: General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology; Space Physics

In this paper we investigate the effects that an anomalous acceleration as that experienced by the Pioneer spacecraft after they passed the 20 AU threshold would induce on the orbital motions of the Solar System planets placed at heliocentric distances of 20 AU or larger as Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. It turns out that such an acceleration, with a magnitude of 8.74\times 10^-10 m s^-2, would affect their orbits with secular and short-period signals large enough to be detected according to the latest published results by E.V. Pitjeva, even by considering errors up to 30 times larger than those released. The absence of such anomalous signatures in the latest data rules out the possibility that in the region 20-40 AU of the Solar System an anomalous force field inducing a constant and radial acceleration with those characteristics affects the motion of the major planets.

http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0601055