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The Pioneer Anomaly & Other Breaking Physics News

Posted by kdawson on from the explaining-the-unseen dept.

David Harris, editor-in-chief at Symmetrymagazine.org (a joint publication of Fermilab and SLAC), sends us to his blog covering the American Physical Society meeting now going on in St. Louis. Among the breaking physics news relating to topics we have discussed in the past: results that explain about 1/3 of the Pioneer anomaly by differential heat flow in the spacecraft; an analysis of the Fermilab Tevatron's chances of spotting the Higgs "God particle"; and a hint that an Italian team has replicated their results from the year 2000 pointing to a detection of dark matter.

11 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Rumor/conjector by FooAtWFU · · Score: 3, Informative

    I read the article on Higgs, and it is entirely conjecture based on specified rumor after rumor. Is this TMZ.com? It's a summary of a physics conference. This is news of physicists describing to each other the state of the art and what they're busy conjecturing, considering, and hoping to prove. Perhaps you were looking for Nature?
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  2. Re:Before LHC though? by yomegaman · · Score: 5, Informative

    The LHC will probably switch on this year, but it won't generate very much luminosity at first. Perhaps by the end of 2009 it will have made a couple of inverse femtobarns which would be enough, but it will be another year or so after that before the data are processed and analyzed. It takes quite a bit of time to understand and interpret the detector readout. The Tevatron does have a chance if the Higgs is around 160 GeV, but only with about one-in-a-thousand level statistical significance, and so far we are not seeing any excess of events there, but in fact somewhat fewer events than expected.

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  3. Re:Rumor/conjector by yomegaman · · Score: 4, Informative

    The bump in the CDF two-tau decay channel went away with more data, which wasn't too surprising. I'm not sure how all that got so blown up in the science press, the original blog post that started it at Cosmic Variance surely didn't make any discovery claim. Having said that, the other half of the story, the rumored huge excess in the D0 three-b-quark channel, is still unresolved as they have not released any results for over a year. We'll probably see something within a few weeks I guess, I have heard that it is close to ready.

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  4. On the Pioneer anomaly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I read a discussion somewhere that many spacecraft pick up a sizable electric charge and keep it (they are after all in a vacuum), and that electrostatic forces from the Sun and the solar wind are enough to account for course deviations. It's certainly true that gravity is not the only force operating out there.

    1. Re:On the Pioneer anomaly by barath_s · · Score: 5, Informative

      Right, radiation pressure, gas leaks, drag, electric charge are all suspects, as are changes in the way data was collected. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly The issue is that the current best guesses for these effects do not yet account for the anomaly.

  5. Re:Enough of the "God Particle" please by spun · · Score: 4, Informative

    Its from the book The God Particle: If the Universe Is the Answer, What Is the Question?. It's a joke, son, laugh.

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  6. Dark Matter... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Is it so hard to see that they're just dealing with the (luminiferous) (a)ether?!?

    See Tesla [1][2], Lyne[1], Silvertooth[3] and many others.

    Oh, but aether has become a term that is a no-no.. so let's call it dark energy, dark matter, the zero point field, etc.

    Currently no university is teaching the real work of Maxwell, but rather the simplified (and lacking!) version by Heaviside.

    [1] http://netowne.com/technology/important/
    [2] http://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/tesla/occultether/occultether.htm
    [3] http://www.unusualresearch.com/silvertooth/silvertooth.htm

    1. Re:Dark Matter... by Tenebrousedge · · Score: 4, Informative

      I would post that sort of nonsense as an AC, too. For those that are unaware, the theory of a luminiferous aether posits that there exists some sort of medium in interstellar space which conducts light. It was completely superseded around the beginning of the last century, mostly by the theories of a man named Einstein. Which explain quite well our observations of the universe on a large scale. Dark matter is an entirely unrelated question related to the amount of matter in the universe. Dark energy, zero-point field...you're just throwing around terms. What we know about the forces in the universe is not exhaustive, but to invent a completely new one just to account for a minor anomaly is not good science. What you are doing here is the equivalent of fighting for the Flat Earth theory, and it disturbs me to see that modded informative here...

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  7. Re:Before LHC though? by bockelboy · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's going to be a race, really, to see what happens first - the Tevatron squeaking out enough events to confirm detection, or the LHC operating smoothly enough to get all the calibration and background processes established, then finding the Higgs.

    It's going to be a close race. On one hand, the LHC will ramp up to have a huge advantage over the Tevatron. On the other hand, the Tevatron folks are at the top of their game.

  8. Re:Enough of the "God Particle" please by emm-tee · · Score: 3, Informative

    Maybe /. could lead the charge to kill this nickname That would be nice. It's correct name is the Higgs boson. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Higgs_boson

    I'm amazed that currently no comment on this article contains the word "boson". I've heard it called the Higgs boson more times than I have the "god particle". Maybe it's just the media I choose to read/watch.
  9. Re:Pioneer Anomaly by sturle · · Score: 2, Informative

    The plutonium source in Pioneer emits 2000W of heat. If only 64W of that heat is radiated asymmetrically away from Pioneer, that will explain the whole anomaly. This is perfectly understandable, and it is even very likely that the heat dissipates a little bit unevenly from Pioneer. You don't need to change the theory of gravity to explain this. Reference here: http://66.102.1.104/scholar?hl=en&lr=&q=cache:Yw3pMm306akJ:www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full/2007/07/aa5906-06/aa5906-06.right.html+