The cause of the perihelion precession of Mercury and all the planets in the solar system

What is it about?

Astronomical observations found that Mercury's orbit around the sun revolve against the clock, and the orbit is not closed, this is the precession of Mercury. The precession of Mercury's perihelion calculated by Newton's law of universal gravitation is not consistent with the observed value. In 1859, the French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier found that the observed value of the perihelion precession of Mercury was 38" per century faster than the theoretical value calculated by Newton's laws, and speculated that this might be caused by the attraction of a planet closer to the sun than Mercury. But after years of painstaking searching for the suspected planet, there was no sign of it. The American astronomer, Newcomb, S., calculated that Mercury's anomalous precession rate was 43"/ century, and later put forward some theories to explain Mercury's anomalous precession, but none of them succeeded. So Newcomb suspects that the law of square inversion in the law of gravity is problematic. For the purpose of explaining the actual motion of several inner planets at the same time, Newcomb worked out that the gravitational force should be inversely proportional to 2.1574 power of the distance. At the end of the 19th century, Weber, Riemann and others, at the early stage of the development of electromagnetic theory, tried to explain the precession of Mercury's perihelion with electromagnetic theory, but they failed to get satisfactory results. In 1916, Einstein published his famous theory of general relativity, claiming to have successfully solved the precession problem of Mercury's perihelion. But general relativity only calculates a precession of 0.43 "per year by a linear approximation, giving no physical reason for the precession, nor the physical meaning of this linear approximation.

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Photo by Ross Sneddon on Unsplash

Photo by Ross Sneddon on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This study has found the physical cause of the perihelion precession of planets in the solar system, which is of great significance to the exploration of the nature of gravity.

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