Tuesday, September 23, 2008

Flyby anomaly as a relativistic transverse Doppler effect?

For half year ago I discussed a model for the flyby anomaly based on the hypothesis that dark matter ring around the orbit of Earth causes the effect. The model reproduced the formula deduced for the change of the velocity of the space-craft at qualitative level, and contained single free parameter: essentially the linear density of the dark matter at the flux tube.

From Lubos I learned about a new twist in the story of flyby anomaly. September twelfth 2007 Jean-Paul Mbelek proposed an explanation of the flyby anomaly as a relativistic transverse Doppler effect. The model predicts also the functional dependence of the magnitude of the effect on the kinematic parameters and the prediction is consistent with the empirical findings in the example considered. Therefore the story of flyby anomaly might be finished and dark matter at the orbit of Earth could bring in only an additional effect. It is probably too much to hope for this kind of effect to be large enough if present.

For background see the chapter TGD and Astrophysics.

4 comments:

Kea said...

Hi Matti. Sorry to post this here, but sometimes I apply for postdocs and I need three referees for this job. Do you think you could email them for me? Deadline is in November.

Matti Pitkänen said...

Well, I am a total outsider even in physics community and especially so in something that relates to category theory!

I encountered similar challenge of listing referees for my own article after I was told that it is very difficult to find non-biased referees.

If you send me your email address to matpitka@luukku.com and some material about your research plan, I could try to cook up something but I am not sure whether it will be regarded as a recommendation!

Anonymous said...

Hi Matti. Just to let you know, Mbelek only looked at the Doppler data, he ignored the ranging data that confirmed it. The anomalies were real, not an effect of the interpretation of the Doppler data.
Jonathan

Matti Pitkänen said...

Thank you Jonathan. This makes the situation interesting. Have you any link to the paper claiming that the effect is real?