8361
Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology / Can Newtonian Precession of Mercury's Perihelion Be Solved Numerically?
« on: 20/10/2016 14:54:01 »
While reading history of scientific progress I got interested to the discovery of planet Neptune as confirmation for the validity of Newton's gravity. This led Urban LeVerrier to hypothesize the existence of planet Vulcan to explain precession of Mercury’s perihelion.
I'm curious at how LeVerrier got his results, and after some searching I found this article.
http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath280/kmath280.htm
But then I realized that the methods described there involve some approximations, even though we are looking for very small discrepancy (43 arcseconds per century), perhaps due to computational limitation of that time.
Does anyone know about more accurate method to calculate Newtonian precession of Mercury’s perihelion?
What is the actual difference compared to observation?
I'm curious at how LeVerrier got his results, and after some searching I found this article.
http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath280/kmath280.htm
But then I realized that the methods described there involve some approximations, even though we are looking for very small discrepancy (43 arcseconds per century), perhaps due to computational limitation of that time.
Does anyone know about more accurate method to calculate Newtonian precession of Mercury’s perihelion?
What is the actual difference compared to observation?