In article ,
Henri Wilson HW@....... wrote:

On Mon, 05 Feb 2007 08:12:11 GMT, (Paul Schlyter) wrote:

Paul, I thank you for your very good comments but since I don't post to
sci.astro very often, I should warn you that am a proponent of the ballistic
theory of light.
I say that light in space moves at c wrt its source star

Well, it does ... so you're quite correct in that.

and that most astronomers are under a delusion in believing that is it moves
at c wrt Earth.

That's not a delusion - there's plenty of experimental evidence that light
always moves at c wrt to any observer on the Earth. And it was this
experimental evidence which caused the birth of the theory of relativity.

Light moves at c with respect to anything: the light source (as you
correctly claim), the Earth's center, any observer on any place on
Earth (which you erroneously call a "delusion"), any other planet or
star, yes even any other light ray.

That's the first fundamental postulate of relativity: light moves at c
with respect to any observer, no matter how that observer moves.

but generally, those in resolvable orbits will be moving very slowly around
their orbits.

It seems you have a quite small telescope. Of course whether a binary is
resolvable depends a lot on your telescope: larger scopes will be able
to resolve many more binary stars.

I don't have a telescope at present...just read what others have to say..

Then I fully understand your difficulty in detecting orbital motions in
binary stars: there is not even one single binary star in our skies where
orbital motion has been detected with the naked eye. Epsilon Lyrae, which
probably is the tightest binary star resolvable to the naked eye, has an
orbital period of many millions of years.

I have myself seen orbital motion in two binaries, with causal visual
observation:

70 Ophiuchi: near its perihelion in the 1980's I observed and drew
this binary once a year. After only some 4-5 years it had changed its
PA by some 90 degrees. Now it's away from perihelion and therefore
moving more slowly, but keep an eye on this pair anyway and you'll see
orbital motion. Although now it may take a decade or two. IF you
attach a micrometer to your eyepiece, so you can detect smaller
changes in PA or separation, you'll detect the motion sooner of
course.

Were you able to resolve the orbit parameters....eccentricity, yaw?

....it takes more than causal visual observations to do that..... :-)

I saw the stars quite noticeably change position with respect to one
another, that's all. To derive orbital parameters would require
micrometric measurements (which I didn't do), preferably over one
full orbit or more. Others have already done that.

Gamma Virginis: In my youth in the 1960's, this binary was easily
resolvable with a separation of some 6 arc seconds. Today it's near
perihelion, with a separation of a fraction of an arc seconds and
most telescopes will be unable to resolve it. Within several years
the pair will widen again, making Gamma Virginis resolvable also
with smaller telescopes.

Thanks for that.

I should advise you that for some time, I have been studying variable star
light curves with the aim of proving Einstein wrong...which of course he was.

:-) ..... I have a book I'd like to recommend you to read. It was
written by Martin Gardner, and it's called "Fads and fallacies in the
name of science". It has a charpter named "Down with Einstein!" where
you'll find examples of other people who, like you, thought they
proved Einstein wrong. Gardner also give examples of people before
Einstein who instead attacked Newton. You know, it's the #1 paradigm
which also is the most popular target for these attacks.

http://tinyurl.com/2xg2yj

Of course, proving Einstein wrong is a wet dream for any scientist,
since anyone who actually succeeds in doing that will make it into the
history of science. But you'd better be able to base your claims on
solid facts! No-one has yet succeeded in doing that. And if your
claims aren't based on facts, they'll fall apart and you'll just
become another one in the long line of those who deluded themselves
to believe they had proved Einstein wrong....

Light from distant stars travels at c wrt those stars

Correct!

and at c+v wrt planet Earth.

Wrong! If light had arrived at Earth with a speed different from c wrt to
the Earth, this would have been detected experimentally over 100 years ago,
in the famous Michelson-Morley experiment, which attempted to measure just
that: variations in the speed of light:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michels...ley_experiment

The correct way to add v to c, the velocity of light, is:

total_speed = (c+v) / ( 1+(cv/c^2))

and here total_speed will become equal to c, no matter what value v has ....

Check out:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_relativity

to see how that formula is derived.


Binary stars in orbit, emit light at sinusoidially varying speed wrt
Earth. Their 'fast' light catches the slower light, causing 'bunching',
which appears to us as a variation in brightness.

You don't need binary stars for that -- the Earth's own orbital motion
causes a yearly variation in the radial velocity of any star with +-
30*cos(ecl_lat) km/s, where ecl_lat is the ecliptic latitude of the
star. So if your claim is correct, then most stars in the sky would
appear to be variable with a period of one Earth year. The only
exception would be stars sufficiently close to the ecliptic poles in
our sky.

Now, check the catalogs of variable stars to see how many variables
you find with a period of exactly one Earth year. How many did you
find? Not ver many, if anyone at all....

Perhaps you think there's a world-wide conspiracy which suppresses and
hides away all information about all those stars in our sky which vary
in brightness with a period of exactly one Earth year? It would of
course be impossible to maintain such a conspiracy, but let's pretend
for a moment that it does exist. There would be an easy way out of
that for you: get a telescope and some good quality photometer, and
start measuring the brightness of the stars yourself!

So what are you waiting for? Get going! :-)

..... and even if you fail to detect any variability of most stars with
a period of exactly one Earth year, you'll at least learn some
practical astronomy. And perhaps you'll also gain a genuine interest
in observing the skies?

--
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Paul Schlyter, Grev Turegatan 40, SE-114 38 Stockholm, SWEDEN
e-mail: pausch at stockholm dot bostream dot se
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