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Physics LibreTexts

15.17: Aberration of Light

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The direction of Earth’s velocity on any particular date is called the Apex of the Earth’s Way. In part (a) of Figure XV.23 I show Earth moving towards the apex at speed ν, and light coming from a star at speed c from an angle χ from the apex.

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The x- and y- components of the velocity of light are respectively ccosχ and csinχ. Relative to Earth (part (b)), the x- and y- components are, by Equations 15.16.2 and 15.16.3 (or rather their inverses)

ccosχ+ν1+(νc)cosχ

and

csinχγ(1+(νc)cosχ).

You can verify that the orthogonal sum of these two components is c, as it should be according to our fundamental assumption that the speed of light is the same referred to all reference frames in uniform relative motion.

The apparent direction of the star is therefore given by

sinχ=sinχγ(1+(νc)cosχ)

It is left as an exercise to show that, for small νc, this becomes

χχ=νsinχc.

with ν = 29.8 km s-1, νc is about 20".5. More details about aberration of light, including the derivation of Equation ???, can be found in Celestial Mechanics, Section 11.3.


This page titled 15.17: Aberration of Light is shared under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by Jeremy Tatum via source content that was edited to the style and standards of the LibreTexts platform.

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