How did general relativity explain the shifting closest point of Mercury’s orbit around the Sun?

In the 19th century, astronomers observed a discrepancy in the precession of Mercury’s orbit—the shifting of its perihelion, or the point of its closest approach to the Sun. While Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation could account for most of this motion through the gravitational influence of other planets, a residual shift of approximately 43 arc seconds per century remained unexplained.123

In 1915, Albert Einstein demonstrated that his general theory of relativity could resolve this anomaly. Unlike Newtonian physics, which treated gravity as a force acting between point masses, general relativity describes gravity as the warping of space and time caused by massive objects like the Sun. By calculating the motion of Mercury from these first principles, Einstein showed that the curvature of space near the Sun naturally accounts for the observed residual precession. This success provided a critical observational verification of his theory.1452