Abstract
It has been reported1 that an observed 160-min solar oscillation may be caused by gravitational radiation from the intense γ-ray source Geminga, a source whose period according to the report is exactly one cycle per year different from the solar oscillation period. This remarkable coincidence has motivated us to look for a sinusoidal component having a period near 160min in Doppler data from the 1981 gravitational wave search with Pioneer 10. We find no such component in our most quiet data. Thus, the amplitude of a possible sinusoidal variation is no more than 3.3 × 10−14 in fractional Doppler frequency, which for the direction of Geminga translates into an upper bound of 2 × 10−14 for the polarization component of gravitational spatial strain potentially observable. This places rather stringent limits on the amount of gravitational radiation available to excite the 160-min normal mode of the Sun.
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Anderson, J., Armstrong, J., Estabrook, F. et al. Pioneer 10 search for gravitational waves—no evidence for coherent radiation from Geminga. Nature 308, 158–160 (1984). https://doi.org/10.1038/308158a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/308158a0
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