Measurement of the solar system acceleration using the Earth scale factor

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new VLBI-based method to measure the solar system's acceleration towards the Galactic center by estimating a scale factor for each radio source, revealing a dipole pattern consistent with Galactic attraction.

Contribution

The study presents a novel source-wise scale factor estimation technique from VLBI data to detect solar system acceleration without source proper motion contamination.

Findings

Detected a dipole systematic aligned with the Galactic center

Measured the Galactocentric acceleration vector as 5.2 ± 0.2 μas/yr

Estimated the acceleration direction with high precision

Abstract

We propose an alternative method to detect the secular aberration drift induced by the solar system acceleration due to the attraction to the Galaxy centre. This method is free of the individual radio source proper motion caused by intrinsic structure variation. We developed a procedure to estimate the scale factor directly from very long baseline interferometry (VLBI) data analysis in a source-wise mode within a global solution. The scale factor is estimated for each reference radio source individually as a function of astrometric coordinates (right ascension and declination). This approach splits the systematic dipole effect and uncorrelated motions on the level of observational parameters. We processed VLBI observations from 1979.7 to 2016.5 to obtain the scale factor estimates for more than 4,000 reference radio sources. We show that the estimates highlight a dipole systematics aligned with the direction to the centre of the Galaxy. With this method we obtained a Galactocentric acceleration vector with an amplitude of 5.2 $\pm$ 0.2 \mu as/yr and direction $\alpha_G = 281\deg \pm 3\deg$ and $\delta_G = -35\deg \pm 3\deg$.