An answer provided by Dr. Sten Odenwald (Raytheon STX) for the NASA Astronomy Cafe, part of the NASA Education and Public Outreach program to the above says ``Special relativity does not enter into the calculation and contributes nothing." (see the link)

But the answer to the same question is quite different as seen in another interpretation of the general relativistic interpretation of the perihelion advance of Mercury as given in a foot-note on page 113 of Thornton-Marion's book (Classical Dynamics of Particles and Systems, 5th edition):

``One half of the relativistic term results from eects understandable in terms of special relativity, viz., time dilation (1/3) and the relativistic momentum effect (1/6); the velocity is greatest at the perihelion and least at aphelion (see Chapter 14). The other half of the term arises from general relativisticeffects and is associated with the nite propagation time of gravitational interactions. Thus, the agreement between theory and experiment confirms the prediction that the gravitational propagation velocity is the same as that for light."

How come, gravitational gravitational propagation velocity in Schwarzschild metric (a static solution of GR, which has the same action-at-a-distance problem as in Newton's law) that one uses to calculate the observed effect?

If we leave aside this finite propagation effect, which other effect nullify the known relativistic contribution to the effect? Does GR nullify the Newtonian contribution to the total precession? I think, any explanation that disregards the special relativistic contribution to the observed effect is faulty.

What the experts think of it?

https://einstein.stanford.edu/content/relativity/q1173.html

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