Conformal Cosmology and the Pioneer Anomaly

TL;DR

This paper explores a conformal gravity-based cosmological model that explains the Pioneer anomaly through a local blueshift region, linking it to cosmological parameters and providing a new perspective on spacecraft acceleration.

Contribution

It introduces a conformal cosmology model that naturally accounts for the Pioneer anomaly via local blueshift effects, connecting spacecraft data with cosmological parameters.

Findings

Conformal cosmology explains Pioneer anomaly without requiring new physics.

The model links anomalous acceleration to the Hubble constant.

Parameters gamma and delta are estimated as ~10^(-28) cm^(-1) and 10^(-4) to 10^(-5).

Abstract

We review the fundamental results of a new cosmological model, based on conformal gravity, and apply them to the analysis of the early data of the Pioneer anomaly. We show that our conformal cosmology can naturally explain the anomalous acceleration of the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, in terms of a local blueshift region extending around the solar system and therefore affecting the frequencies of the navigational radio signals exchanged between Earth and the spacecraft. On the contrary, conformal gravity corrections alone would not be able to account for dynamical effects of such magnitude to be capable of producing the observed Pioneer acceleration. By using our model, we explain the numerical coincidence between the value of the anomalous acceleration and the Hubble constant at the present epoch and also confirm our previous determination of the cosmological parameters gamma ~ 10^(-28) cm^(-1) and delta ~ 10^(-4) - 10^(-5). New Pioneer data are expected to be publicly available in the near future, which might enable more precise evaluations of these parameters.