Measurement of the Solar Gravitational Deflection of Radio Waves using Geodetic Very-Long-Baseline Interferometry Data, 1979-1999

摘要

We used very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) to measure the deflection by the Sun of radio waves emanating from distant compact radio sources. This bending is characterized in the parametrized post-Newtonian formalism by γ, which is unity in general relativity. Using a large geodetic VLBI data set, we obtained γ= 0.99983 +- 0.0004_5 (estimated standard error). We found no systematic biases from our analysis of subgroups of data.