The Lingering Anomalous Secular Increase of the Eccentricity of the Orbit of the Moon: Further Attempts of Explanations of Cosmological Origin

摘要

New analyses of extended data records collected with the Lunar Laser Ranging (LLR) technique performed with improved tidal models were not able to resolve the issue of the anomalous rate e ˙ of the eccentricity e of the orbit of the Moon, which is still in place with a magnitude of e ˙ = ( 5 ± 2 ) × 10 - 12 yr?1. Some possible cosmological explanations are offered in terms of the post-Newtonian effects of the cosmological expansion and of the slow temporal variation of the relative acceleration rate S ¨ S - 1 of the cosmic scale factor S. None of them is successful since their predicted secular rates of the lunar eccentricity are too small by several orders of magnitude.