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

Abstract

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.

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

References in corpus (6)

• The Study of the Pioneer Anomaly: New Data and Objectives for New Investigation
• Could the Pioneer anomaly have a gravitational origin?
• Can Minor Planets be Used to Assess Gravity in the Outer Solar System?
• The Pioneer Anomaly: Seeking an explanation in newly recovered data
• A Mission to Explore the Pioneer Anomaly
• A Novel Two-Step Laser Ranging Technique for a Precision Test of the Theory of Gravity

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