A Serious Anomaly

RANT #12: The Astronomical Unit (AU) was established as a convenient scaling distance for planetary correlations. With the advent of satellites and laser distancing it has become one of the most precisely known distances. It is a twelve digit figure (149,597,870,700 meters) with an uncertainty of 3 in the smallest digit. An anomalous increase in the AU between Earth and Mars of 20 cm/year over the period from 1976 to the present. This is absolutely contrary to expectation. Quoting from KentuckyFC@arxivblog.com: "One explanation is that the mass of the sun is increasing (there is a mathematical relationship linking the AU to the mass of the sun. In fact, the mass of the sun ought to be decreasing because of mass loss to solar radiation and the solar wind. To explain the increase in the AU, the sun would have to be increasing it mass by 10^18 kilograms per year. That's equivalent to swallowing a good sized planetary moon or about 40,000 comets per year. Surely we'd have noticed that." The report is by John Anderson and Micheal Nieto, Anomalous Solar System Anomalies, Proc. IAU Symposium 261 or go to arXix.org and find PDF file arXiv 0907:2469. You can also see what's coming from (Ebony Dungeon) Webaddress. We know the universe is expanding and in fact increasing its rate of expansion. So what doesn't occur to these ortho-physicists that the increasing AU is related to the expansion? I have for some time suggested that Eddington's model of the surface of an expanding ballon with ink dots but in four dimensional spacetime is unnecessarily hard to fathom. It seems that the phenomenal model is a bowl of exploding popcorn with each kernal moving away from every other one. This rate of expansion is given by the Hubble constant which is assummed to be the same throughtout the universe. It has a value of 74.1 km/sec/Mpc - the Mpc is the megapasec and a very long distance 3.09e22 km. So for every unit of that distance the universe expands by 74.1 km every second. So the question is how does 20 cm/yr/AU convert to Hubble units? The answer is 0.13 km/sec/Mpc. - Break in blog - I had worked out all the conversion factors in about seven lines of tedious typing and went to save it by highlighting to copy and paste to the blog and closed the file instead. So you're spared a dubious foray. The upshot of all this is that solar radiation could account for the serious anomaly. Certainly better than feeding the sun a moon every year. The ortho-physicists won't admit a causal relationship between space and light. We'll see.