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

TL;DR

This study uses the latest planetary ephemeris data to set a new, stronger constraint on the Yukawa suppression of the Newtonian potential, which relates to the graviton's mass, surpassing previous gravitational wave bounds.

Contribution

Introduces a novel statistical method to derive constraints on Yukawa suppression from planetary ephemeris data, improving upon previous limits on graviton mass and Compton wavelength.

Findings

Degradation of residuals at certain wavelengths constrains graviton mass.

New limit: graviton mass > 3.62 x 10^{-23} eV/c^2.

Stronger than previous gravitational wave bounds.

Abstract

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 $\lambda_g$. 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 $\lambda_g \leq$ $3.43 \times 10^{13}$ km with a 99,7% confidence level -- corresponding to a graviton mass bigger than $3.62 \times 10^{-23}$ eV$/c^2$. 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 $\lambda_g >3.93 \times 10^{13}$ km ($m_g <3.16 \times 10^{-23}$ eV$/c^2$).