Constraint on the Yukawa suppression of the Newtonian potential from the planetary ephemeris INPOP19a

Description

We use the latest solution of the ephemeris INPOP (19a) in order to improve our previous constraint on the existence of a Yukawa suppression to the Newtonian potential, generically associated to a graviton's mass. Unlike the ephemeris INPOP17a, several residuals are found to degrade significantly at roughly the same amplitudes of the Compton wavelength λg. As a consequence, we introduce a novel statistical criterion in order to derive the constraint with INPOP19a. After checking that it leads to a constraint consistent with our previous result when applied on INPOP17b, we apply the method to the new solution INPOP19a. We show that the residuals of Mars orbiters, Cassini, Messenger, and Juno, degrade significantly when λg≤3.43×1013  km with a 99.7% confidence level—corresponding to a graviton mass bigger than 3.62×10-23  eV/c2. This is a stronger constraint on the Compton wavelength than the one obtained from the first gravitational-wave transient catalog by the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration in the radiative regime, since our 90% C.L. limit reads λg>3.93×1013  km (mg<3.16×10-23  eV/c2).

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