Analysis of Inner Planet Orbital Azimuth Drift

The residual perihelion precession of Mercury of 43 arcseconds per century has long been regarded as core observational evidence for spacetime curvature in general relativity. By reviewing historical planetary perturbation calculations and numerical simulation workflows, this residual difference is not an inherent defect within the framework of Newtonian mechanics. Analytical theories by Le Verrier and Newcomb adopted mathematical treatment of full orbital period time averaging, which smoothed out transient strong torques arising from close planetary encounters. Early N body numerical simulations from the 1980s used a fixed 5 day time step, leading to insufficient sampling of short duration strong gravitational pulses and producing implicit numerical averaging effects. Modern DE series ephemerides embed post Newtonian relativistic corrections directly and fit parameters against observational data, creating circular reasoning and making it impossible to obtain genuine perturbation results under a pure Newtonian framework. From the perspective of geometric physics, real perihelion precession corresponds to azimuthal rotation of the empty focus of the ellipse, causing overall displacement of the entire elliptical orbit. Pure orbital deformation only changes orbital eccentricity and produces radial shifts of the empty focus without azimuthal rotation. Mercury possesses the largest orbital eccentricity among the eight planets, and its mass is far smaller than the masses of the Sun, Venus and Earth. Its orbit is highly susceptible to gravitational perturbations from external bodies. The empty focus lies far from the Sun and is extremely sensitive to lateral torques. Actual precession effects concentrate within short time windows during a limited number of close planetary encounters across a century. Whether analytical outputs from period averaging match real physical evolution cannot be determined solely by mathematical derivation. The true physical criterion must come from pure Newtonian long duration N body integration without relativistic corrections and with adaptively refined time steps during near encounter intervals, to identify the real physical origin of the 43 arcsecond residual.