Constraining the Mass of the Graviton with the Planetary Ephemeris INPOP

We use the planetary ephemeris INPOP17b to constrain the existence of a Yukawa suppression to the Newtonian potential, generically associated with the graviton’s mass. We also give an interpretation of this result for a specific case of fifth force framework. We find that the residuals for the Cassini spacecraft significantly (90% C.L.) degrade for Compton wavelengths of the graviton smaller than $1.83\times {10}^{13}\mathrm{km}$, which correspond to a graviton mass bigger than $6.76\times {10}^{-23}\mathrm{eV}/c^2$. This limit is comparable in magnitude to the one obtained by the LIGO-Virgo Collaboration in the radiative regime. We also use this specific example to defend that constraints on alternative theories of gravity obtained from postfit residuals may be generically overestimated.

Figure 1

Plot of ${\chi }^2({\lambda }_g)$ and the constraints deduced for ${\lambda }_g$. The probabilities $p=90\%$ and $p=99.9999999\%$ correspond to critical values of ${\chi }^2$ equal to, respectively, 15.99 and 62.94.