Light bending in the Solar System

At microarcsecond accuracy levels, such as those measured by Gaia, relativistic effects begin to play a considerable role. In particular, general-relativistic gravitational light deflection due to Solar System bodies will have profound effects on Gaia measurements over the planned 5 year lifetime of the mission. This is vividly illustrated in an animation, created by Jos de Bruijne, from which the image above has been extracted.

The animation can be downloaded from here for viewing. This animation depicts an all-sky map of the sky as seen from L2 - Gaia will perform its observations from here. Ecliptic coordinates (increasing from left to right, with 0 degrees in the center) are used in a Hammer projection. The integrated amount of light bending due to all planets in the Solar System, plus Ceres and our Moon, is shown with a colour scale (see object names and time scale on image). Contributions from the Sun are excluded. Further details on the contributions from Solar System bodies, and on how the animation was created, can be found in the technical note (Gravitational light deflection; GAIA-JdB-001) prepared by de Bruijne (available on request from the author).

Image courtesy of Jos de Bruijne.

[Published: 28/07/2003 ]