## Monday, 23 March 2020

### Precession of perihelion of Mercury

In 5.5, we continue our adventures from the previous section 5.4 where we calculated a few things from the Killing vectors and geodesics of the Schwarzschild metric. I learnt a good lesson about Killing vectors then that went over my head previously.

There are several amazing things in this section one group being mathematical dexterity and the other being the feats of astronomers. The latter have measured the precession of the perihelion of Mercury at ${44}^{\prime\prime} \text{per century}$. ${44}^{\prime\prime}$ is 44 seconds of an arc or 44 times 1/3600 degrees. That's about the angle that a soccer ball would subtend if it was one kilometer away and if you could see it. How did they do that?

Apparently we are following d'Inverno 1992, not Einstein, and we start with a differential equation for the orbit in terms of radial distance $r$ and affine parameter $\lambda$ and turn it into a simpler differential equation in terms of $x\propto1/r$ and azimuth $\phi$. A crafty differentiation then makes the equation further collapse into the equation of an ellipse with a small perturbation, as witnessed by astronomers. Using more trigonometrical tricks we then solve the GR perturbation part and find a term in that which must correspond to the precession. A further trig trick gets us to "the equation for an ellipse with an angular period that is not quite $2\pi$" and from that we extract the precession of the perihelion of Mercury. How did anybody think up all that?

The image shows the path of a Mercury that precesses about a million times faster than our own Mercury. I plotted it to check the  "the equation for an ellipse with an angular period that is not quite $2\pi$". It is surprisingly accurate for such a large precession.