Measurement of the solar gravitational deflection of radio waves using geodetic very-long-baseline interferometry data, 1979-1999

Abstract

We used very-long-baseline interferometry (VLBI) to measure the deflection by the Sun of radio waves emanating from distant compact radio sources. This bending is characterized in the parametrized post-Newtonian formalism by gamma, which is unity in general relativity. Using a large geodetic VLBI data set, we obtained gamma=0.9998(3)+/-0.0004(5) (estimated standard error). We found no systematic biases from our analysis of subgroups of data.