Related papers: V.M. Slipher and the Development of the Nebular Sp…
Priority in the discovery of the velocity-distance relationship may be shifting from Edwin Hubble to Georges Lemaitre, but any reassessment of credit must also consider the contributions of Vesto Slipher. Not only were his spiral galaxy…
By 1917, V.M. Slipher had singlehandedly established a tendency for 'spiral nebulae' to be redshifted (21 out of 25 cases). From a modern perspective, it could seem surprising that the expansion of the universe was not announced at this…
When V. M. Slipher gave the 1933 George Darwin lecture to the Royal Astronomical Society, it was natural that he spoke on spectrographic studies of planets. Less than one-sixth of his published work deals with globular clusters and the…
Why do some discoveries, which appear in hindsight to be obviously major discoveries, have so little impact when they were made. These are discoveries that were ahead of their time, but for some reason the scientific community was not ready…
A brief history of the discovery of the expanding universe is presented, with an emphasis on the seminal contribution of VM Slipher. It is suggested that the well-known Hubble graph of 1929 could also be known as the Hubble-Slipher graph.…
Based on historical facts, revisited from a present-day perspective, and on the documented opinions of the scientists involved in the discovery themselves, strong arguments are given in favor of a proposal to include prominent astronomer…
Henry Norris Russell, one of the most influential American astronomers of the first half of the 20th Century, had a special place in his heart for the Lowell Observatory. Although privately critical of the founder for his pronouncements…
Doppler effect and Hubble effect in different models of space-time related to the space-time velocity of an observer are considered. The Doppler effect and Doppler shift frequency parameter are connected with the kinematic characteristics…
The determination of velocities of stars from precise Doppler measurements is described here using relativistic theory of astronomical reference frames so as to determine the Keplerian and post-Keplerian parameters of binary systems. We…
Significant progress has been made during the last 10 years toward resolving the debate over the expansion rate of the Universe. The current value of the Hubble parameter, Ho, is now arguably known with an accuracy of 10%, largely due to…
The precise radial velocity technique is a cornerstone of exoplanetary astronomy. Astronomers measure Doppler shifts in the star's spectral features, which track the line-of/sight gravitational accelerations of a star caused by the planets…
Measuring the rate at which the universe expands at a given time -- the 'Hubble constant' -- has been a topic of controversy since the first measure of its expansion by Edwin Hubble in the 1920's. As early as the 1970's, Sandage et de…
Planetary nebulae are now well established as probes of galaxy dynamics and as standard candles in distance determinations. Motivated by the need to improve the efficiency of planetary nebulae searches and the speed with which their radial…
The Doppler effect is commonly used to infer the velocity difference between stars based on the relative shifts in the rest-frame wavelengths of their spectral features. In dynamically-cold systems with a low velocity dispersion, such as…
Spectral-line displacements away from the wavelengths naively expected from the Doppler shift caused by stellar radial motion may originate as convective shifts (correlated velocity and brightness patterns in the photosphere), as…
The empirical formula proposed by J. D. Anderson et al. [1] to reproduce the data on the Earth flyby anomalies is derived from special relativity (SR). The transverse Doppler shift together with the addition of velocities account for the…
The Planetary Nebula Spectrograph is a dedicated instrument for measuring radial velocity of individual Planetary Nebulae (PNe) in galaxies. This new instrument is providing crucial data with which to probe the structure of dark halos in…
Edwin Hubble is often credited with discovering the expanding Universe based on spectra taken by him. This statement is incorrect and we feel that it is the responsibility of those who are aware of the historical facts to set the record…
The longitudinal Doppler shift is a measure of hyperbolic distance. Transformations of uniform motion are determined by the Doppler shift, while its square root transforms to a uniformly accelerated frame. A time-velocity space metric is…
Redshift observations of galaxies outside the Local Group are fairly common in extragalactic astrophysics. If redshifts are interpreted as arising from radial velocities, these must be corrected by the contamination of the solar motion. We…