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I was looking for accurate and up-to-date data regarding the advancement of the perihelion of the planets in the Solar System, the only ones I've found so far are at least 90 years old bout I really doubt that no progress has been made so far in this field... does anyone know where to find newer ones?

In addition to this, can anybody make an estimation about the difference between the Moon-Earth system precession around the Sun and a Moonless Earth system? It should be very small, too small to be detected maybe...

Thank you in advance!

HDE 226868
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Klest Dedja
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    This doesn't answer your question, but, are you familiar with the DE431 ephemeris, which predicts planetary positions for +-15000 years from now, and is supposed to account for relativistic effects? –  Oct 08 '14 at 23:59

2 Answers2

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I might be misunderstanding your question, but using HORIZONS (http://ssd.jpl.nasa.gov/horizons.cgi) with these settings should give you the data you need:

enter image description here

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The precession of the perihelion of the planets depends mostly on the effects of the other planets perturbations, but also to a lesser extent on relativistic effects, the aspherical shape of the sun and solar tides. See also Wikipedia's Apsidal precession.

This calculation of the effects of pertubations includes a comparison of the actual and observed rates of precession of perihelion. It gives rates in arcseconds per year:

Mercury  5.75
Venus    2.04
Earth   11.45
Mars    16.28
Jupiter  6.55
Saturn  19.50
Uranus   3.34
Neptune  0.36

For Mercury the observed rate of precession is rather more than would be predicted from perturbations. The reason for this is general relativity, and was one of the first pieces of observational evidence for relativity.

Jens
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James K
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