Pioneer : Anomaly Still Anonymous

Lester Zick wrote:
On Tue, 25 Jul 2006 10:59:37 +0100, "George Dishman"
wrote:
"Lester Zick" wrote in message
.. .
On 24 Jul 2006 16:31:05 -0400, (Steve Willner)
wrote:
....
The primary reasoning is that there is an upper
limit to the size of the stars. I've seen a figure
of around 0.7 times the mass of the Sun for one
cluster but I can't find the reference now. Anyway
the inference is that any larger stars have burnt
out and since large stars burn faster, that gives
a lower limit for the age of the stars.
....
I don't know what
the new evidence for their actual youth consisted of but I distinctly
remember reading about it. My inference was based on the idea that
stars in the globular cluster had not yet collapsed into a rotating
disk analogous to the Milky Way and had not had time to produce a
significant amount of interstellar dust. Just annoying.

Just wrong. Galaxy disks form from _gas_, and globular clusters have
very little. Without gas, there is no way to form a disk. (Think
about conservation of angular momentum.) The stars don't collide.

That wasn't my point exactly. There is no angular momentum along polar
axes to keep a globular shape.

Not true, think of every star in the cluster being
on a cometary orbit around the centre with random
orientations.

Not what I had in mind. I was referring to angular momentum for the
cluster as a whole not individual stars in it.

You need to consider what Steve meant. I understand
him to be saying that a globular will _never_ become
a disk.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020730.html

As far as I can tell there would only
be radiation pressure or electrostatic pressure of some kind to
maintain polar dimensions.

That would be meaningful if the stars individually
orbited in planes perpedndicular to some common
axis but that isn't the case.

And I suggest I've gotten my information from perfectly reliable
sources which yield exactly the ratio of v/c required to explain the
discrepancy d/D which characterizes the Pioneer anomaly within 2%.

Unfortunately your relaiable source didn't point
out that the anomaly was an error in acceleration,
not an error in speed.

Technical authority and journalistic reliability are different things
but don't necessarily conflict. I had no special interest in Pioneer
until the article was published about a year and a half ago. And I'm
pretty sure the numbers themselves came from Anderson or JPL.

The numbers are not bad, a bit of rounding probably
but the article didn't tell the whole story. Now you
have the paper, you can see even from the abstract
that they say "an apparent anomalous acceleration
is acting on Pioneer 10 and 11, with a magnitude
a_P ~ 8*10^-8 cm/s^2, directed towards the Sun."

Anyway, let's cover that in the other thread you started.

George

On 26 Jul 2006 09:11:58 -0700, "George Dishman"
wrote:


Lester Zick wrote:
On Tue, 25 Jul 2006 10:59:37 +0100, "George Dishman"
wrote:
"Lester Zick" wrote in message
.. .
On 24 Jul 2006 16:31:05 -0400, (Steve Willner)
wrote:
...
The primary reasoning is that there is an upper
limit to the size of the stars. I've seen a figure
of around 0.7 times the mass of the Sun for one
cluster but I can't find the reference now. Anyway
the inference is that any larger stars have burnt
out and since large stars burn faster, that gives
a lower limit for the age of the stars.
...
I don't know what
the new evidence for their actual youth consisted of but I distinctly
remember reading about it. My inference was based on the idea that
stars in the globular cluster had not yet collapsed into a rotating
disk analogous to the Milky Way and had not had time to produce a
significant amount of interstellar dust. Just annoying.

Just wrong. Galaxy disks form from _gas_, and globular clusters have
very little. Without gas, there is no way to form a disk. (Think
about conservation of angular momentum.) The stars don't collide.

That wasn't my point exactly. There is no angular momentum along polar
axes to keep a globular shape.

Not true, think of every star in the cluster being
on a cometary orbit around the centre with random
orientations.

Not what I had in mind. I was referring to angular momentum for the
cluster as a whole not individual stars in it.

You need to consider what Steve meant. I understand
him to be saying that a globular will _never_ become
a disk.

I understand. I just disagree. But I don't quite understand what the
angular momentum of isolated star orbits within the cluster has to do
with the problem when considered apart from the angular momentum of
the cluster as a whole. Just because we have some cluster star in a
polar orbit doesn't mean the associated angular momentum cannot be
conserved in a much tighter orbit and even be transferred to other
stars through collision.

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020730.html

As far as I can tell there would only
be radiation pressure or electrostatic pressure of some kind to
maintain polar dimensions.

That would be meaningful if the stars individually
orbited in planes perpedndicular to some common
axis but that isn't the case.

Well I have yet to see any celestial object which didn't rotate in
aggregate. To my way of thinking the only property common to every
celestial aggregate is rotation of some kind.

And I suggest I've gotten my information from perfectly reliable
sources which yield exactly the ratio of v/c required to explain the
discrepancy d/D which characterizes the Pioneer anomaly within 2%.

Unfortunately your relaiable source didn't point
out that the anomaly was an error in acceleration,
not an error in speed.

Technical authority and journalistic reliability are different things
but don't necessarily conflict. I had no special interest in Pioneer
until the article was published about a year and a half ago. And I'm
pretty sure the numbers themselves came from Anderson or JPL.

The numbers are not bad, a bit of rounding probably
but the article didn't tell the whole story. Now you
have the paper, you can see even from the abstract
that they say "an apparent anomalous acceleration
is acting on Pioneer 10 and 11, with a magnitude
a_P ~ 8*10^-8 cm/s^2, directed towards the Sun."

Anyway, let's cover that in the other thread you started.

Okay agreed. As mentioned over there I'm pondering some kind of
regression and integration of the numbers with one another. I'm pretty
sure they reflect the same effect and do so fairly accurately.

Lester Zick
~v~~

In article ,
Lester Zick writes:
I still maintain that globular clusters are still considerably younger
than the Milky Way as a whole.

If you find evidence for this, please let us know. No one who has
studied globular clusters thinks so.

The age of stars in the clusters is not
as significant to me as the globular shape of the clusters.

Are you thinking the cluster formed _after_ the stars? How do you
think that could happen? And if it could, why doesn't the Milky Way
have similar clusters made up of younger stars?

Your view of globular clusters is very far from the accepted one,
which is that the stars formed within the clusters very early in the
Milky Way's history.

The justification I've read on more than one occasion over the past
several decades was that globular clusters had very little dust with
the inference being that they had very little dust because they were
assumed to have blown most all their dust through stellar
radiation.

The standard view is that they started with very little dust because
the stars (and thus the gas from which those stars formed) have very
low metallicity.

I still maintain the that the fact that
globular clusters have yet to collapse along polar regions into disks
indicates that they are really very young in comparison to the Milky
Way.

I think you are alone in this view. In particular, there is no
physical mechanism to cause such a collapse.

My take on the relative absence of dust was that the globular
clusters simply haven't had time to produce significant amounts of
interstellar dust.

Open clusters, which are much younger, have lots of dust. See the
Pleiades, for example. And very young clusters that are still
forming stars, such as Taurus, Orion, or Ophiuchus, are so full of
dust that most of the stars cannot be seen in visible light.

SW Galaxy disks form from _gas_, and globular clusters have
SW very little. Without gas, there is no way to form a disk. (Think
SW about conservation of angular momentum.) The stars don't collide.

here is no angular momentum along polar
axes to keep a globular shape.

Angular momentum of globular clusters -- which means the sum of the
orbital angular momentum of all the stars in them -- is nearly zero.
If the stars formed a disk, the angular momentum would have to become
large, which would require a net torque on the orbits. Where would
such a torque come from?

Elliptical galaxies and bulges of spiral galaxies are other
structures with near-zero angular momentum.

As far as I can tell there would only
be radiation pressure or electrostatic pressure of some kind to
maintain polar dimensions.

Neither is important for stellar motions. It's all gravity.

Eventually I expect all globular stellar
forms to collapse along polar axes unless the collapse precipitates
novas etc.

Let us know if you figure out a mechanism that could cause such a
collapse.

And in message :
In effect what I'm suggesting is that various gravitational constants
for whatever source or sources really become variables at significant
fractions of v/c.

What I'm suggesting is that you calculate v/c for the planets. All
of them give the _same_ value for the Sun's GM, despite very
different v/c for each planet.

And in message :
And I strongly (but politely) disagree because the anomaly is between
actual distance traveled versus expected distance traveled. Everything
else represents potential assumptions and interpretations

As George explained, what was actually measured for the Pioneers was
the _radial velocity_ of each Pioneer at numerous times over several
years, and what was found was not just an average acceleration over
that interval but that the acceleration was (to within small error
bars) _constant_. If you want acceleration to be proportional to
v/c, I expect that will be ruled out by the data because v decreased
over those several years of monitoring. (That's what George was
getting at with his linear versus quadratic.)

--
Steve Willner Phone 617-495-7123
Cambridge, MA 02138 USA
(Please email your reply if you want to be sure I see it; include a
valid Reply-To address to receive an acknowledgement. Commercial
email may be sent to your ISP.)

Craig Markwardt wrote:
"Aleksandr Timofeev" writes:

What gives to you reliance of reliability of formal accuracy of
definitions of values of masses of planets in the new theories?


What give you the inkling that that is relevant to the Williams,
Newhall & Dickey (1996, Phys Rev D, 53, 6730) upper limit to
equivalence violation from the earth-moon system?

Further I shall set up the rather strange statements in relation to the
conventional
views.

From my point of view, here has a place a situation similar to
Michelson-Morley experiment on detection of a motion of system in space
on the basis usages of interior physical processes. Moon - Earth is
uniform gravitational system. For this reason (!), any endogenous
(interior - inside viewed system) the physical process will give "zero"
effect (result) for an average of motions of parts of system concerning
a barycentre of system.

Further I shall proclaim the following principle:

For natural gravitational planetary system, which one consists of two
or more planets, any careful dynamic definitions of quantities of
planetary masses always will give smaller values of quantities of
masses, than trajectory ("tracking") definitions of quantities of
planetary masses by space probes.

At the close analysis of experimental results, this statement is
confirmed in overwhelming majority of cases.


CM

Lester Zick wrote:
On Sun, 23 Jul 2006 22:50:42 +0200, "Paul B. Andersen"
wrote:

Lester Zick wrote:
On 19 Jul 2006 23:05:49 -0700, "George Dishman"
wrote:

Lester Zick wrote:

Let me tell you a brief story. In 89 as an offer of good faith to the
editor of a revisionist magazine to show I had some interesting ideas
in astrophysics, I explained that globular clusters surrounding the
Milky Way were the youngest not the oldest objects in the galaxy as
was commonly thought at the time. Needless to say five years or so
later the astrophysical community was astounded to learn they had been
completely mistaken. Once burned twice shy.
Globular clusters are still known to be very old
Decades old conventional wisdom based on a supposition that globular
clusters had blown away all their interstellar dust. I don't know what
the new evidence for their actual youth consisted of but I distinctly
remember reading about it.
I suppose you by the phrase "globular clusters surrounding the
Milky Way" are referring to the objects in the Milky Way commonly
categorized as "globular clusters".
There is no new evidence for the youth of these globular clusters,
they are indeed still believed to be the oldest objects in the galaxy.
However, there is a paper claiming that the star association
Cygnus OB2 really is a young globular cluster.
http://tinyurl.com/gr5do

And HST has observed a number of young globulars in _other_ galaxies.

So a globular doesn't have to be very old, and to the extent
the astronomical community thought that _all_ globulars are old,
they were 'completely mistaken'. (I am not sure they thought so, though.)

But the globulars you were referring to are indeed very old,
and there is no evidence for the astronomical community being
wrong about that.

My inference was based on the idea that
stars in the globular cluster had not yet collapsed into a rotating
disk analogous to the Milky Way and had not had time to produce a
significant amount of interstellar dust. Just annoying.
And why should they evolve into rotating disks?

Probably for the same reason galaxies evolve into rotating disks.
Eventually they collapse along polar regions where there is no
rotation to support them. At least that's my reasoning and I see
nothing to argue against it.

Lester Zick
~v~~

Your reasoning is wrong, but not unique.
See:
http://www.tass-survey.org/richmond/.../globclus.html

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap020730.html

Paul

Aleksandr Timofeev wrote:
Craig Markwardt wrote:
"Aleksandr Timofeev" writes:

What gives to you reliance of reliability of formal accuracy of
definitions of values of masses of planets in the new theories?


What give you the inkling that that is relevant to the Williams,
Newhall & Dickey (1996, Phys Rev D, 53, 6730) upper limit to
equivalence violation from the earth-moon system?

Further I shall set up the rather strange statements in relation to the
conventional
views.


From my point of view, here has a place a situation similar to
Michelson-Morley experiment on detection of a motion of system in space
on the basis usages of interior physical processes. Moon - Earth is
uniform gravitational system. For this reason (!), any endogenous
(interior - inside viewed system) the physical process will give "zero"
effect (result) for an average of motions of parts of system concerning
a barycentre of system.

The reference:

http://adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/np...e0e5 18d10068


Further I shall proclaim the following principle:

For natural gravitational planetary system, which one consists of two
or more planets, any careful dynamic definitions of quantities of
planetary masses always will give smaller values of quantities of
masses, than trajectory ("tracking") definitions of quantities of
planetary masses by space probes.

At the close analysis of experimental results, this statement is
confirmed in overwhelming majority of cases.


CM

"Aleksandr Timofeev" writes:

Craig Markwardt wrote:
"Aleksandr Timofeev" writes:

What gives to you reliance of reliability of formal accuracy of
definitions of values of masses of planets in the new theories?


What give you the inkling that that is relevant to the Williams,
Newhall & Dickey (1996, Phys Rev D, 53, 6730) upper limit to
equivalence violation from the earth-moon system?

Further I shall set up the rather strange statements in relation to the
conventional
views.
....

The Williams, Newhall & Dickey paper does not concern spacecraft
tracking within the earth-moon system, nor does it involve direct
measurement of the masses of planetary bodies. Thus, even leaving
aside the vagueness of your claims (i.e. what a "uniform gravitational
system" is, or what a "natural gravitational planetary system" is),
your claims are irrelevant since they do not address the techniques of
the paper.

... For this reason (!), any endogenous
(interior - inside viewed system) the physical process will give "zero"
effect (result) for an average of motions of parts of system concerning
a barycentre of system.

Since the Williams Newhall & Dickey technique involves measuring the
effect of an "exterior" object -- the sun -- on the earth-moon system,
your claim is irrelevant.

CM

On 26 Jul 2006 17:22:51 -0400, (Steve Willner)
wrote:

In article ,
Lester Zick writes:
I still maintain that globular clusters are still considerably younger
than the Milky Way as a whole.

If you find evidence for this, please let us know. No one who has
studied globular clusters thinks so.

Obviously they have their opinions and I have mine. It's a relatively
trivial issue.

The age of stars in the clusters is not
as significant to me as the globular shape of the clusters.

Are you thinking the cluster formed _after_ the stars?

No.

How do you
think that could happen? And if it could, why doesn't the Milky Way
have similar clusters made up of younger stars?

My understanding is that the Milky Way has globular clusters in a halo
surrounding it.

Your view of globular clusters is very far from the accepted one,
which is that the stars formed within the clusters very early in the
Milky Way's history.

I know. That's why I brought the subject up originally. I see nothing
but relatively young stars of light constituents with little gas in
globular clusters. In other words nothing at all to indicate globular
clusters are very old.

The justification I've read on more than one occasion over the past
several decades was that globular clusters had very little dust with
the inference being that they had very little dust because they were
assumed to have blown most all their dust through stellar
radiation.

The standard view is that they started with very little dust because
the stars (and thus the gas from which those stars formed) have very
low metallicity.

Which indicates to me they're all relatively young.

I still maintain the that the fact that
globular clusters have yet to collapse along polar regions into disks
indicates that they are really very young in comparison to the Milky
Way.

I think you are alone in this view. In particular, there is no
physical mechanism to cause such a collapse.

I think the real question is what is there to prevent such a collapse?
If the stars in a globular cluster are sufficiently self attracted
under mutual gravitational attraction to form and maintain a globular
form what prevents them from contracting further? In instances like
stars and planets electrodynamic and electrostatic pressure impede
collapse. But the tendency toward collapse is always present.

My take on the relative absence of dust was that the globular
clusters simply haven't had time to produce significant amounts of
interstellar dust.

Open clusters, which are much younger, have lots of dust. See the
Pleiades, for example. And very young clusters that are still
forming stars, such as Taurus, Orion, or Ophiuchus, are so full of
dust that most of the stars cannot be seen in visible light.

I didn't say there weren't. What I asked is what prevents globular
clusters from contracting along polar regions and used that as an
argument to suggest they're actually relatively young instead of old.

SW Galaxy disks form from _gas_, and globular clusters have
SW very little. Without gas, there is no way to form a disk. (Think
SW about conservation of angular momentum.) The stars don't collide.

here is no angular momentum along polar
axes to keep a globular shape.

Angular momentum of globular clusters -- which means the sum of the
orbital angular momentum of all the stars in them -- is nearly zero.
If the stars formed a disk, the angular momentum would have to become
large, which would require a net torque on the orbits. Where would
such a torque come from?

Okay if net angular momentum of globular clusters were even actually
zero what would prevent them from contraction in all directions? It's
the same question of mutual gravitational attraction. I just assumed
we were talking about significant net angular momentum for the cluster
as a whole in reference to a collapse into a disk. Frankly I doubt
there are any objects in the universe with actually zero net angular
momentem. But either way very old objects should have collapsed long
ago through an exhaustion of radiation pressure.

Elliptical galaxies and bulges of spiral galaxies are other
structures with near-zero angular momentum.

I can't argue the point intelligently. But I'm very skeptical that
there are any objects anywhere in the universe with literally zero net
angular momentum. In fact as I mentioned to George the other day
rotation seems the most prominent feature to me characteristic of
every object in the universe.

As far as I can tell there would only
be radiation pressure or electrostatic pressure of some kind to
maintain polar dimensions.

Neither is important for stellar motions. It's all gravity.

And gravitation is attractive. So what keeps gravitation from going
the whole way and further collapsing objects except for electrodynamic
and eletrostatic pressure?

Eventually I expect all globular stellar
forms to collapse along polar axes unless the collapse precipitates
novas etc.

Let us know if you figure out a mechanism that could cause such a
collapse.

If gravitation caused it in the first place the question to ask is
what stops the collapse?

And in message :
In effect what I'm suggesting is that various gravitational constants
for whatever source or sources really become variables at significant
fractions of v/c.

What I'm suggesting is that you calculate v/c for the planets. All
of them give the _same_ value for the Sun's GM, despite very
different v/c for each planet.

Aha! The problem with the planets is that they have very little net
radial velocity with respect to the sun. It's not just v/c that causes
the anomaly but v/c toward or away from the sun. Gravitational doppler
occurs in the case of planets but the result is just the anomalous
perihelion advance most prominently typified by Mercury but with all
planets.

And in message :
And I strongly (but politely) disagree because the anomaly is between
actual distance traveled versus expected distance traveled. Everything
else represents potential assumptions and interpretations

As George explained, what was actually measured for the Pioneers was
the _radial velocity_ of each Pioneer at numerous times over several
years, and what was found was not just an average acceleration over
that interval but that the acceleration was (to within small error
bars) _constant_.

Well George and I straightened that out. So in effect we have a radial
velocity with a constant anomalous change detected not attributable to
any known source.

However as a minor philosophical point of problematic interest, as I
pointed out to George I doubt it's possible to measure intangibles
like velocity and acceleration without measuring position first in
relation to other positions. Even in the case of frequency modulation
you have some reference frequency of definable wavelength taken in
relation to some other.But as I say it's mainly a philosophical issue.

If you want acceleration to be proportional to
v/c, I expect that will be ruled out by the data because v decreased
over those several years of monitoring. (That's what George was
getting at with his linear versus quadratic.)

Well the change in velocity is proportional to v/c. There's no
question about that because that's what I demonstrated by showing
d/D=D/c within 2% over the period indicated. That's fact. The only
issue remaining is to connect the radial gravitational doppler effect
v/c with the reported value of acceleration. And that's what I'm
working on now.

However I think the term "acceleration" is misued in this context.
There are basically two kinds of acceleration possible: an absolute
acceleration and a relative acceleration. Absolute acceleration
results from a force and causes change in velocity on its own wheras
relative acceleration merely changes some underlying velocity.

For example if we have some absolutely stationary object in space,
gravitational acceleration will cause it to begin to move. That is not
what's happening in the case of the Pioneer anomaly. I doubt whatever
the actual cause of the Pioneer anomaly it would cause a stationary
Pioneer to begin to move on its own.

On the other hand a relative acceleration merely reacts to alter an
already present underlying velocity. It's really a first order effect
like friction or longitudianl doppler instead of a second order effect
like gravitational force. It changes velocity but only in proportion
to velocity.

So I think characterizing the Pioneer anomlay as acceleration and
reporting it in terms of cm/secsec gives the misleading impression
we're looking at some force instead of a linear effect superimposed on
an underlying velocity. In actuality the anomaly is the linear effect.
It looks like acceleration as a whole but only because it represents a
composite of a linear effect caused by the underlying velocity itself.

What I'm suggesting here I suppose is that reporting the anomaly
itself as N cm/secsec is wrong and that it should have been reported
as N/sec.

By the way if you want to continue discussing globular clusters here
don't mind but I'd prefer further discussion of gravitational doppler
to be routed to my thread on that subject.

Lester Zick
~v~~

In article ,
Lester Zick wrote:

On 26 Jul 2006 17:22:51 -0400, (Steve Willner)
wrote:

snip

Your view of globular clusters is very far from the accepted one,
which is that the stars formed within the clusters very early in the
Milky Way's history.

I know. That's why I brought the subject up originally. I see nothing
but relatively young stars of light constituents with little gas in
globular clusters. In other words nothing at all to indicate globular
clusters are very old.

Surely you've heard of Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams! The difference
between the plots for a young galactic cluster and a globular is
obvious. If the stars in globulars are young, why are none of them hot
and massive, and why are there so few in the main sequence?

Here's a side-by side comparison (one of hundreds on the Web, I'm sure)
in schematic form:

http://bustard.phys.nd.edu/PH308/Milky_Way/clusters.html

--
Odysseus

On Fri, 28 Jul 2006 07:36:31 GMT, Odysseus
wrote:

In article ,
Lester Zick wrote:

On 26 Jul 2006 17:22:51 -0400, (Steve Willner)
wrote:

snip

Your view of globular clusters is very far from the accepted one,
which is that the stars formed within the clusters very early in the
Milky Way's history.

I know. That's why I brought the subject up originally. I see nothing
but relatively young stars of light constituents with little gas in
globular clusters. In other words nothing at all to indicate globular
clusters are very old.

Surely you've heard of Hertzsprung-Russell diagrams!

No. I haven't studied celestial physics since college.

The difference
between the plots for a young galactic cluster and a globular is
obvious. If the stars in globulars are young, why are none of them hot
and massive, and why are there so few in the main sequence?

And if globular clusters are old how is it they haven't progressively
collapsed to form disks?

Here's a side-by side comparison (one of hundreds on the Web, I'm sure)
in schematic form:

http://bustard.phys.nd.edu/PH308/Milky_Way/clusters.html

Lester Zick
~v~~