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Darn those tv shows. They tend to toss out those peculiarities whenever they feel like it. For instance, that NASA deep space probe that's not following the orbit that physics says it should. The telemetry says the launch went as perfectly as possible for such things. The hardware takes off for interstellar space with all the verve that its creators hoped. BUT, it's swerving off the planned path.

This engendered as close to a heart attack as staid science allows. How can this hunk of hardware, every milligram planned for and calculated, be not going where it should? And it's not a small deviation, either.

Well, let's look at this from simple situations, as Occam would have it. You launch an object into a "zero g" environment and give it a shove over thataway. Given how little gravity there should be out there, your shove should send it in a straight line. It didn't. So... Now we ask why.

Here is a theory that explains a few things. Let's suppose that there is a black hole in our solar system. I know that concept is not a blockbuster, but I'm not done. Suppose this is not a marble-sized object (can you call a black hole an "object"?), but something with the mass of, say, Earth. Let's place it somewhere around the orbit of the steroid belt, but not necessarily in the ecliptic. What could it do if it had been around long enough? Something like ruin the formation of a planet, perhaps? Leaving a ring of loose junk... Umm, fill in the blank spot in what Bode's law says about our solar system? Ruin the projected orbit of a probe?

Of course that's just a theory. The proof might lie in launching a number of probes in almost the same orbit. One of them might disappear! But that's not likely. Not in an era when we're turning our attention inward rather than outward.

Because, if it was true, it might open all kinds of doors. At the very least, we could well use such a thing to slingshot probes or ships further and faster than we have yet gone. And that, to my mind is worth a few hunks of hardware!