Related papers: Cosmic deceptions due to peculiar motions
Doppler lensing is the apparent change in object size and magnitude due to peculiar velocities. Objects falling into an overdensity appear larger on its near side, and smaller on its far side, than typical objects at the same redshifts.…
A challenge in teaching about special relativity is that a number of the theory's effects are at odds with the intuition of classical physics, as well as student's everyday experience. The relativity of simultaneity, time dilation and…
Possibly the most peculiar expectation of the standard fine-tuned cosmological paradigm is that cosmic acceleration is to only be a very recent (z<1) phenomenon, with the universe being required to be decelerating at all higher redshifts.…
According to the Cosmological Principle an observer stationary with respect to the comoving coordinates of the expanding universe should find the redshift distribution of distant quasars to be isotropic. However, the observed redshift…
Extragalactic proper motions can reveal a variety of cosmological and local phenomena over a range of angular scales. These include observer-induced proper motions, such as the secular aberration drift caused by the solar acceleration about…
A common belief about big-bang cosmology is that the cosmological redshift cannot be properly viewed as a Doppler shift (that is, as evidence for a recession velocity), but must be viewed in terms of the stretching of space. We argue that,…
A major recent evelopment in observational cosmology has been an accurate measurement of the luminosity distance-redshift relation out to redshifts z=0.8 from Type Ia supernova standard candles. The results have been argued as evidence for…
Bulk peculiar flows are commonplace in the universe, with many surveys reporting their presence on scales spanning between few hundred and several hundred Mpc. However, the sizes and the speeds of some of these bulk flows are well in excess…
Under the assumption that they are standard(isable) candles, the lightcurves of Type Ia supernovae have been analyzed in the framework of the standard Friedmann-Lema\^itre-Robertson-Walker cosmology to conclude that the expansion rate of…
Peculiar motions are commonplace in the universe. Our local group of galaxies, for example, drifts relative to the Hubble flow at about 600 km/sec. Such bulk flows are believed to fade away as we move on to progressively larger scales.…
Our proper acceleration with respect to the Cosmic Microwave Background results in a real-time change of the angular position of distant extragalactic sources. The cosmological component of this aberration drift signal, the non-inertial…
The discovery that the cosmic expansion is accelerating has been followed by an intense theoretical and experimental response in physics and astronomy. The discovery implies that our most basic notions about how gravity work are violated on…
Doppler shift observations of several spacecrafts during near Earth flybys show an unexplained frequency shift. This shift is interpreted as an unexpected velocity change called Earth flyby anomaly. A theory of non-privileged reference…
We investigate the effects of the aberration of light for a uniformly accelerating observer. The observer we consider is initially at rest with respect to a luminous spherical object--a star, say--and then starts to move away with constant…
Astronomers occasionally detect an object having unexpected shape, unexplainable photometry, or unprecedented spectra that are inconsistent with our contemporary knowledge of the universe. Upon careful assessment, many of these anomalies…
Stationary observers in static spacetimes see falling objects spread exponentially fast, or fast-scramble, near event horizons. We generalize this picture to arbitrary cosmological horizons. We give examples of exponential fast-scrambling…
Information exchanged between observers in the universe typically travels along the null rays of the associated light signals. One may therefore decompose the luminosity distance of a given radiation source along these null geodesics,…
Recent observations of distant supernovae imply, in defiance of expectations, that the universe growth is accelerating, contrary to what has always been assumed that the expansion is slowing down due to gravity. In this paper a…
The redshift of all cosmological sources drifts by a systematic velocity of order a few m/s over a century due to the deceleration of the Universe. The specific functional dependence of the predicted velocity shift on the source redshift…
We investigate in detail an apparently unnoticed consequence of special relativity. It consists in time dilation/contraction and frequency shift for emitted light affecting accelerated reference frames at astronomical distances from an…