Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-physics-course-of-the-year-1-of-the-natural-sciences-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2019/section-a/1/solution

Rearrange the supplied form of Kepler's third law to make the gravitational constant the subject:
Convert the semi-major axis and orbital period to SI units before substitution:
The central value is therefore
For monomial uncertainty propagation, logarithmic differentiation gives
If the quoted errors are independent standard uncertainties, the variances of these contributions add:
Thus , and the measured result under that statistical convention is
The semi-major axis measurement supplies the largest individual contribution to the relative uncertainty.
The paper does not specify whether its errors are statistical uncertainties or bounds. If they are maximum input errors, the first-order worst-case error propagation estimate adds magnitudes:
Correlation between input errors would instead require the covariance terms in the general propagation of uncertainty formula; they are not specified.

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