Mysterious Force Affects Pioneer 10 & 11 Probes

JabbaTheFart writes "The Guardian is writing that something strange is tugging at America's oldest spacecraft. As the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes head towards distant stars, scientists have discovered that the craft - launched more than 30 years ago - appear to be in the grip of a mysterious force that is holding them back as they sweep out of the solar system. Some researchers say unseen 'dark matter' may permeate the universe and that this is affecting the Pioneers' passage. Others say flaws in our understanding of the laws of gravity best explain the crafts' wayward behaviour."

Comments

Different directions

[jolyonr]

What's interesting about this is the craft went in different directions out of the solar system, which rules out something like the mass of an unknown body in the outer solar system affecting their flight.

Laws of Physics

[Anonymous Coward]

It is neat to see things like this which challenge our understanding of relatively basic things like gravity. Part of me is still hopeful that we will find some holes in the relativity theory. More than a few scientists have pointed out other inconsistencies between observations and relativity. It would be nice not to be constrained by this whole 186,000 miles per second thing :)

Re:Laws of Physics

[rdmiller3]

This is exactly what those probes were launched for. It's great that they're not behaving as predicted. When everything behaves as we expect we don't learn much, but verifiable errors in our predictions can open entire dimensions of study that we didn't see before.

To paraphrase Carl Sagan, the real moments of discovery aren't when someone shouts, "Eureka!" but sometime before that when someone mumbles, "Hm, that's weird..."

Re:Laws of Physics

[thered]

If it turns out not to be true, then most of the physics that has been done for the past 150 years is flat out wrong

Using the same logic, you could say that Newton's Laws have been "flat out wrong" for the past 90 years, but for many, many, applications, from automobiles to rocket boosters, they are "perfectly" accurate (from an engineer's point of view).

Re:Radiation pressure

[Genady]

And why wasn't it seen until now? And why did it start effecting the two craft at the same time? Provide a few more details of the radiation pressure hypothesis, or better a few links and I'll be more apt to believe you. Until then I remain skeptical. The Pioneer Anomaly has been around for a little while, long enough to generate more than a few ( Google Search of Citebase)) papers written to try to explain the anomaly. Dismissing them all out of hand in two sentences is NOT good science, but then hey, this is Slashdot, what do I expect?

Mod parent up

[ananiasanom]

The key issue here is that the verb "to effect" is meaningful and useful, and we are rapidly losing it through ignorant misuse. One can advocate a descriptive rather than prescriptive approach to language, but that isn't the same as defending actual errors in widely-understood words. Saying "effect" when you mean "affect" isn't like saying "ain't" when you mean "isn't", it's like saying "Austria" when you mean "Australia".

Re:explanation???

[dasmegabyte]

True that. Admitting uncertainty is the first step of science..."we don't know for sure why this is, so we'll propose a hypothesis, test it, and if the results don't clarify anything, we'll propose another one."

I don't know why people are shocked, or take it as a sign of supernatural causes every time a scientist "isn't sure." They're never sure. If they were sure, they wouldn't be scientists. Science takes a certain amount of confidence in a possibility, but being "sure" is the first step towards fudging data that's inexplicable. The universe is infinitely large and thus infinitely complex, and we'd only been empirically studying it for a few thousand years. Most of our in-depth insights have taken place in the past 200 years, and many clarifications and exceptions have taken place in the past 50, and even the past 20.

Scientists have a notoriously matter-of-fact attitude that leads some people to believe that science believes itself to be infallible. It doesn't. But due to the need for strict controls, even on language, to avoid confusion between scientists, even false and preposterous assumptions need to be stated matter-of-factly. Scientists don't claim to have all the answers...they just claim to have some very realistic (and repeatable) ones.

Re:It's the Klingons!

[Kethinov]

According to the first episode of Enterprise, it takes 4 days to reach Kronos at approximately warp 4. That puts the Klingon homeworld only about 1ly away from Earth, which is 4x closer than the nearest star.

Logically, we must assume 1. the episode is wrong (correct assumption) or 2. the Klingon Empire is a LOT closer than you thought, Mr. Vulcan.