An improved test of the general relativistic effect of frame-dragging using the LARES and LAGEOS satellites
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Date
2019-10-23
Type of Work
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Citation of Original Publication
Ciufolini, Ignazio;
Paolozzi, Antonio;
Pavlis, Erricos C.;
Sindoni, Giampiero;
Ries, John;
Matzner, Richard;
Koenig, Rolf;
Paris, Claudio;
Gurzadyan, Vahe;
Penrose, Roger;
An improved test of the general relativistic effect of frame-dragging using the LARES and LAGEOS satellites;
The European Physical Journal 79,872 (2019);
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-019-7386-z
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Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)
Abstract
We report the improved test of frame-dragging,
an intriguing phenomenon predicted by Einstein’s General
Relativity, obtained using 7 years of Satellite Laser Ranging
(SLR) data of the satellite LARES (ASI, 2012) and 26 years
of SLR data of LAGEOS (NASA, 1976) and LAGEOS 2
(ASI and NASA, 1992). We used the static part and temporal
variations of the Earth gravity field obtained by the space
geodesy mission GRACE (NASA and DLR) and in particular the static Earth’s gravity field model GGM05S augmented
by a model for the 7-day temporal variations of the lowest
degree Earth spherical harmonics. We used the orbital estimator GEODYN (NASA). We measured frame-dragging to
be equal to 0.9910±0.02, where 1 is the theoretical prediction
of General Relativity normalized to its frame-dragging value
and ±0.02 is the estimated systematic error due to modelling
errors in the orbital perturbations, mainly due to the errors in
the Earth’s gravity field determination. Therefore, our measurement confirms the prediction of General Relativity for
frame-dragging with a few percent uncertainty.