Seems a bit too obvious to not have been considered/eliminated as the most likely cause all along. Or was it just too hard to confirm without the Sensor data so that people instead spent all that time discussing outlandish explanations?
Yes, it has been the leading hypothesis for a long time (as long as I can remember). The point of the exercise was to confirm it with high enough precision to rule out other possible explanations. If you read the article, you will see that this was mostly a non-trivial problem of tracking down all of the data.
People might be confused because there have always been lots of articles on all the explanations that involve new physics and such, which are a lot more exciting to write about (and memorable) than boring, but likely explanations involving non-uniform thermal radiation.
Evidence for this explanation has been around for a number of years though this appears to be the final nail in the coffin for nay sayers. Some very precise modelling of the pioneer spacecraft and its thermal properties was done a couple of years ago and this bore out the thermal radiation theory.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 43.9 ms ] threadShould work.
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2010/12/15/...
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