By Xeno
Finally, the case is solved, and the villain is dead.
As the two spacecraft retreated into the distance, the data they beamed back showed that they were slowing down a little more than they should have been. Long vaunted as evidence that something was amiss in physics — perhaps that Einstein’s theory of gravity was wrong — the anomaly spawned entire academic conferences and thousands of papers.
But, as explained in our coverage of an earlier stage of Turyshev et al.’s work, some scientists believed that the anomaly had a much more mundane explanation. Namely, the scientists suspected that heat was being emitted by the spacecraft’s generators anisotropically — more in one direction than the other. If this were the case, the heat would exert an unbalanced recoil... More...
