Interesting how you started out with the Pioneer Anomaly, because that’s what got me thinking back in 2008 (give or take a few years) about a different explanation for dark energy and the fabric of space.
Before I get to that, your postulation about gravity waves emanating from a gravity well in what is essentially a standing wave makes some sense to me. We know that gravity waves are real since they have been measured after the merger of stellar masses. If a shock wave like that is generated, one that travels through the fabric of space over thousands of light years, then why must gravity waves only be the result of a violent event? Why can’t they be generated by a stationary object like a star? Besides, last I recall, stars are themselves near-perpetual violent events.
I honestly think you’re on to something there. It makes sense.
However, given the gossamer weakness of the waves detected so far, I’m not sure that a “standing gravity wave” would be strong enough to render the effects you describe, at least within the solar system. That, and the standing wave theory would require that the sunward acceleration of the Pioneer probe would have happened in phases, whereas the data seem to indicate the sunward acceleration was steady. The heat escaping from the wiring does seem to offer a likely explanation.
The same question would apply to Oumuamua’s unexplained acceleration — did it change as it crossed standing gravity waves, or was it constant? (On a side note — I didn’t know about that anomaly, and I hadn’t known about Bertrand’s theorem. Thank you very much!)
Furthermore, when it comes to the formation of galaxies, if the galaxy waves were indeed powerful enough to cause the formation of a ring galaxy, then it would seem that ring galaxies would be the norm, rather than the rare exception.
That being said, I could easily be wrong…and I hope you stick to your guns concerning the existence of standing gravity waves.
Let me describe what I originally thought about the Pioneer anomaly. You’ll like this, I promise — it’s a perfect example of Alexander Pope’s poem where he warns us that a little learning is a dangerous thing, that we should drink deep, or not at all.
What got my attention was how close its degree of deceleration was to the degree of the cosmological constant. So that got me thinking. As we know from frame-dragging, space is not uniform, but it ever-so-slightly stretched even in gravity wells as small as Earth’s. So I figured that if that’s the case, if space is stretched in a gravity well, then wouldn’t that mean that a kilometer in a gravity well would be slightly longer than a kilometer in deep space? Wouldn’t that mean that when an object transits from interplanetary or interstellar space into a gravity well, even though the km/s velocity remained constant, a distant observer would perceive an apparent acceleration as the object shifted from deep space to that gravity well?
I really thought I was on to something, because that also seemed to explain both the fly-by anomaly and the galaxy rotation problem. Best of all, it seemed to explain dark energy since our earthly observations are taken in “stretched space”, but interstellar and intergalactic space wasn’t stretched, and so the redshift of distant objects would be significantly increased since the photons would be traveling through normal “unstretched” space, and our measurements made from inside a gravity well would be inaccurate…all of which would have meant that the distant galaxies are not accelerating after all. I thought I had found the source of the cosmological constant!
So I eagerly posted it online, got good comments…and then one day someone a whole lot more edjimicated than I pointed out that my theory would require really strange effects from starlight courtesy of the inverse-square law. My reply went something like, “But…but…but….” But he was right and I was wrong.
Anyway, I still think dark energy and dark matter can be explained by the fabric of space and different consistencies therein…but I think that your idea is more likely, more evidence-based than my own.
Besides, my idea still doesn’t explain that pesky fly-by anomaly….
