By Meghan Rosen
Nature’s slipperiest constant might be a smidge bigger than the currently accepted value.
Newton’s gravitational constant, the notoriously hard-to-measure “Big G,” is about 0.02 percent larger than the current standard, researchers report September 5 in Physical Review Letters.
If correct, the new value means that “Jupiter and the sun are probably a bit lighter than we think,” says study coauthor Harold Parks of Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque.
But a slightly bigger G shouldn’t change physicists’ work much, says Stephen Merkowitz, a NASA physicist who chased the cagey constant in 2000 with physicist Jens Gundlach. “It doesn’t really impact how we calculate orbits or trajectory of spacecraft,” he says.