Mercury's perihelion precession

The gradual rotation of Mercury’s orbital ellipse, measured as the shift of its perihelion over time. Most of the motion follows Newtonian gravity; general relativity explains the remaining anomaly.

Schwarzschild precession: The relativistic advance of an orbit’s periapsis in the spacetime around a spherical, nonrotating mass. This is the principal relativistic contribution to Mercury’s anomalous perihelion advance.
Urbain Le Verrier: A French astronomer who calculated planetary orbits and predicted Neptune from irregularities in Uranus’s motion. His analysis of Mercury’s orbit established the nineteenth-century discrepancy that demanded explanation.
Periapsis: The point in an orbit at which an orbiting body is closest to the body it orbits. Mercury’s perihelion is its periapsis around the Sun.
Mercury: The smallest planet in the Solar System and the closest to the Sun. Its eccentric, close-in orbit makes relativistic perihelion advance unusually measurable.
Newtonian perturbation theory: Methods for calculating how gravitational disturbances alter motion predicted by an idealized Newtonian system. Planetary perturbations account for most of Mercury’s observed perihelion motion.
Vulcan (hypothetical planet): A hypothetical planet once proposed to orbit between Mercury and the Sun. Vulcan was proposed to explain the excess precession before general relativity supplied an account.
Orbital eccentricity: A measure of how much an orbit deviates from a circle. Mercury’s noticeably eccentric orbit makes its perihelion direction well-defined.
Astronomical unit: The standard unit of length defined as exactly 149,597,870,700 metres. Mercury’s orbital scale helps set the size of the relativistic correction.
Planetary perturbations: Changes in a planet’s motion caused by gravitational forces from other bodies. The other planets produce the dominant nonrelativistic advance of Mercury’s perihelion.
Einstein field equations: Equations relating spacetime curvature to the distribution of matter and energy. Einstein derived Mercury’s anomalous advance from his new gravitational field equations.

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