All in the MOND
Jul 22, 2009

In a previous Picture of the Day article we noted that NASA scientists have determined that both of the Pioneer spacecraft are off course by more than a hundred thousand kilometers. At the time, investigative team members remarked that they had no explanation for the navigational deviation, so many speculations were offered about what “mysterious” forces could be acting on the most distant of artificial objects. Multidimensional space, dark energy, dark matter "friction," and other ironic theories such as “gravity affecting antimatter differently” were offered to the scientific press as "explanations" for the deceleration.

In September 1998 the same inexplicable "tug" seemed be acting on the now defunct Ulysses spacecraft as it swung through the Solar System in a high orbit over the Sun's poles. Ulysses exhibited an anomalous acceleration toward the Sun when radio signals from Earth were returned from an onboard transponder. A Doppler shift in the frequency of the return transmission indicated a variance greater than could be accounted for by known mechanisms—as of today, no one in the conventional science community can provide a solid explanation for it.

Telemetry from NEAR-Shoemaker, the Galileo mission to Jupiter, Cassini-Equinox, the Rosetta cometary probe, and the MESSENGER mission to Mercury reveal similar discrepancies. Astronomers are baffled by this information because standard theories of motion in the cosmos rest within a gravitational model.

Modified Newtonian Dynamics (MOND), a theory developed in the early 1980s by Mordehai Milgrom, was also suggested as a possible reason for the effects on the various space probes, although Milgrom himself feels that MOND is far too diffuse a force to affect such small objects. Perhaps the suggestion is no more inexact than those previously mentioned.

However, on the large scale, according to MOND theory, gravity can vary depending on acceleration. Since the velocity measurements of some stars at the edges of various galaxies seem to demonstrate greater speeds than they should, Milgrom proposed that gravity can alternate between two states: one where its influence falls off with the square of the distance—Newtonian gravity, and one where its force is linear, declining with the distance—MOND.

According to a recent press release, anomalies in the rotational velocity versus the gravitational binding of stars within galactic orbits may not require the existence of dark matter to provide additional attractive force.

MOND was offered as an alternative to cold, dark matter's inferred gravity field. Since stars on the outskirts of galactic disks revolve at greater-than-apparently-possible velocities, they "must be" experiencing the effects of an unseen and undetectable mass. In short, a volume of dark matter exists in and around many galaxies that is five times the volume of normal matter. It is the invisible matter that is exerting itself so strongly. See the Picture of the Day "Detecting the Undetectable" for more information.

Both of these phenomena, the deceleration of space probes in the Solar System, as well as the unexpected stellar velocities in galaxies, can be explained by one thing: electricity flowing through dusty plasma.

As a spacecraft travels through the interplanetary medium it builds up a negative charge differential with respect to the positive charge of the Sun. The Sun's weak, radial electric field, extending outward for almost a light-day without diminishing, and generated by the movement of charged particles known as the "solar wind," draws the negatively charged object back toward itself.

The linear attributes of MOND gravity theory are a powerful hint at what might actually be taking place in galaxies as well as star systems. Since electric forces can scale by many orders of magnitude, the weak, radial electric field of the Milky Way galaxy, for example, is most likely doing the same thing to the stars at its outer boundary as the Sun is doing to the charged objects within its sphere of influence.

The Sun is not keeping its family of planets in lockstep by gravity alone, its electric field is also acting in an additional, if not principle manner. It is the e-field of the galaxy that is keeping the stars in orbit around the nucleus with the addition of the far less powerful gravitational field. If e-fields and electrical transmission over star-spanning distances would be given their due, MOND, dark matter and all the other ad hoc Big Bang theories would vanish.

Stephen Smith