Recent work by Dicke has shown that the sun is not a perfect spheroid, but has an oblateness of a factor of 5*10^(-5). One consequence of this oblateness is a change in the gravitational potential of the sun, which should affect the motion of the planets. In contrast with Dicke's study, based on scalar gravitational theory, the Einstein relativistic gravitational theory is used to study the effect of the oblateness of the sun on the motion of a single planet in the ecliptic plane under the assumption that the sun is an oblate ellipsoid of revolution and (for simplicity) under the assumption that the sun is homogeneous.
Department of Quantum Statistics
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