The advance of Mercury’s perihelion

Abstract A very famous ‘test’ of the General Theory of Relativity (GTR) is the advance of Mercury’s perihelion (and of other planets too). To be more precise, this is not a prediction of General Relativity, since the anomaly was known in the 19th century, but no consistent explanation had been found yet at the time GTR was elaborated. Einstein came up with a solution to the problem in 1914. In the case of Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun, the effect is more pronounced than for other planets, and observed from Earth; there is an advance of the perihelion of Mercury of about 5550 arc seconds per century (as/cy). Among these, about 5000 are due to the equinox precession (the precise value is 5025.645 as/cy) and about 500 (531.54) to the influence of the external planets. The remaining, about 50 as/cy (42.56), are not understood within Newtonian mechanics. Here, we revisit the problem in some detail for a presentation at the undergraduate level.