What do the orbital motions of the outer planets of the Solar System tell us about the Pioneer anomaly?

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate the effects that an anomalous acceleration as that experienced by the Pioneer spacecraft after they passed the 20AU threshold would induce on the orbital motions of the Solar System planets placed at heliocentric distances of 20AU or larger as Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. It turns out that such an acceleration, with a magnitude of 8.74×10−10ms−2, would affect their orbits with secular and short-period signals large enough to be detected according to the latest published results by E.V. Pitjeva, even by considering errors up to 30 times larger than those released. The absence of such anomalous signatures in the latest data rules out the possibility that in the region 20–40AU of the Solar System an anomalous force field inducing a constant and radial acceleration with those characteristics affects the motion of the major planets.