How Disproving the Big Bang Explains the Pioneer Spacecraft Mystery

Sometime around 2004, two Pioneer spacecraft, 10 and 11, passed Uranus. They’d been launched some 30 years earlier as part of missions to Jupiter, Saturn, and eventually deep space. After they passed Uranus approaching the outer limits of the solar system, something weird happened: the satellites slowed down. A dozen or so explanations were offered up, and none of them could be conclusively verified. It remains a mystery.

Some blame the mundane thermal radiation pressure forces inherent in the spacecraft. Dark matter was one idea, but given that we don’t even know what dark matter is or if it’s even a thing that exists, that’s pretty speculative. David Crawford at the University of Sydney in Australia has another idea and it’s something weird and unsettling enough to make dark matter look like small cosmic potatoes. That idea is this: there was no big bang. We live in a static universe that has no beginning. The universe is not expanding. There was no inflationary period, no multiverse, no dark matter, no dark energy.

In other words, everything is much more like we see it, more intuitive.

How this connects to the Pioneer probes will take a second, so bear with me. We think the universe is expanding mainly because of something called red shift. Red shift is a way that we can, by observing the changing frequencies of light from an object, determine that that object – like a galaxy – is moving away from us. And those frequencies are changing. This was something Edwin Hubble came up with almost a century ago, and it’s something that’s been confirmed a number of times in the past decade (notably courtesy of the Hubble telescope).

So, anyhow, we’ve been pretty sure about this big bang/expanding universe stuff. But, what if there was a way we could explain red shift by something other than universal expansion. The first part of this is the idea that spacetime is not flat. I’m not going to get into how that’s weird and different and hard to get one’s head around, but understand that the flatness of spacetime is a feature neccessary for redshift calculations to work right.

Which doesn’t explain the red shift we observe. In a paper on arxiv.org (via Technology Review), Crawford is suggesting the explanation for that is a to-be-identified high-energy plasma that’s present as a sort of ether is space. Which is something that can actually be supported by observations of x-ray background radiation. The red shift is the result of things in space rubbing up against this plasma, and also interplanetary dust – which Crawford suggests might be denser than currently thought.

The presence of this plasma takes care of the need in cosmology for dark matter and energy, replaces them in the equations. And Crawford suggests in the paper that this plasma/dust is what’s slowing down the Pioneer spacecraft. It would be neat if we could just get in touch with the probes and, like, ask them what’s out there, but we’ve since lost contact. Pioneer 10 should reach the Taurus constellation in about 2 million years.

Also, this isn’t the first time recently that the big bang has come under attack. There’s a theorized alternative that has to do with something called the Born-Infeld action, which is a new idea about how gravity and energy affect each other. Then there’s this other new theory that suggests that time and space are actually the same thing, which also kills the idea of the big bang. But that’s for another time.

Reach this writer at michaelb@motherboard.tv.