Development of Computational Code to Estimate the Non-Relativistic Contribution to Mercury’s Perihelion Precession

• Published in: Journal of physics. Conference series Vol. 2919; no. 1; pp. 12043 - 12050
• Main Authors: Kundu, Jayashree, Mandal, Rakesh Kumar, Sarkar, Tamal
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Bristol IOP Publishing 01.12.2024
• Subjects: Algorithms; Dwarf planets; Gravitational fields; Kepler laws; Mercury; Mercury (planet); Perihelion; Perihelions; Planetary orbits; Precession; Programming languages; Python; Solar system
• ISSN: 1742-6588; 1742-6596; 1742-6596
• DOI: 10.1088/1742-6596/2919/1/012043

The Sun’s gravitational field confines the solar system, our eight known planets, and dwarf planets. This gravitational pull of the Sun and other planets causes Mercury, the nearest planet to the Sun, having the highest orbital precession among all other planets in the Solar system, to follow a new path slightly preces than its normal one. This paper studies Mercury’s orbit by developing an algorithm to determine the nonrelativistic contribution to Mercury’s perihelion precession per century. To create this, we have considered Newton’s Law of Gravitation, Kepler’s Law of Planetary Motion and used orbital data of Planets and Dwarf Planets around the Sun. Hence, our computational code first finds the mass of the Sun and then the nonrelativistic precession of Mercury’s perihelion shift following the mathematical model mentioned in Price and Rush’s paper,1979, where they assumed that all the planets’ masses, except Mercury, are distributed in a uniform circular ring centering the Sun. The developed computational code has been implemented through the programming language Python which has very powerful, faster data handling and visualizing packages like Numpy, astropy, matplotlib, and many more.