Prologue

Previous posts have looked at the paucity of real evidence for heliocentricity.  Remarkably these failures in experimentation or evidence, are always turned into ‘proofs’ by ‘The Science’.  Other models which can explain the same phenomena are dismissed out of hand due to the philosophical-world or universe-view that heliocentricity ‘must be right’.  The reality is that there is not a single mechanical proof to support Copernicanism.  This post will look at 3 standard text-book proffered ‘proofs’ for heliocentricity, namely, star streaming, the Doppler effect and geocentric (and Tychonic) geometrical complexity. 

The standard textbook list of ‘proofs’ for heliocentricity usually include this list:

1.     Newton’s theory of gravitational attraction

2.     The Stellar Parallax

3.     Stellar aberration of the Sun

4.     The Foucault Pendulum

5.     The bulge at the Equator

6.     Geosynchronous satellites

7.     Space probe measurements

8.     Retrograde motion

9.     Star-streaming (this post)

10.  The Doppler effect (this post)

11.  Geometric complexity of geocentrism (this post)

#9 Star-streaming

Star-streaming is the optical phenomenon occurring when stars seem either to spread apart from each other or come closer together.  Streaming can include a clustering of stars, or the ‘shredding’ of stars within an area of a galaxy.  Astronomers have been uncovering the stellar remains of ripped clusters and galaxies, since the first streams were discovered in the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (another interesting future topic which also upends Copernican theory).  Recently a star stream supposedly 10 times longer than the milky way, was discovered and named the ‘Giant Coma stream’. 

(CGI representation of streaming stars)

The concept of star-streaming is due at least in part to an optical illusion.  If you ride in a car that is moving parallel to a forest, you will notice as you move past, that some trees seem to spread out from each other, whilst others converge.  This is due to the relative motion between you ‘the observer’ and the trees as objects.  The effect is only optical, not real. 

The first astronomer to notice this effect in the heavens was William Herschel who in 1783, discovered that the Sun appears to move through the stars.  He isolated thirteen such stars and found that as the Sun moved through them, they were spreading apart from a point in the constellation Hercules.  He then isolated thirty-six stars and found similar results.  Friedrich Argelander, an assistant to Friedrich Bessel, found similar results with 390 stars in 1830.  In 1842 Otto Struve confirmed the results.  The Doppler effect is real and has been verified since 1842. 

As in the case of parallax discovered in 1838, these star-streaming results were invariably touted as proof of the heliocentric system.  Star-streaming, however, provides no proof of anything.  The reason is simple.  The optical illusion of the separation of the stars can be caused either by the Earth moving past the stars or the stars moving past a fixed Earth.  Both will produce the same phenomenon of star-streaming.  This is akin to the example above, with a car moving past the forest analogy and the observer’s optical impression of clustering and separating trees. 

If we look at the ‘Giant Coma stream’, which is an intergalactic cluster of stars, the identification of star-streaming has no relationship to heliocentricity.  No one knows why stars cluster or are torn apart, or are randomly clustered, with most in science ascribing the destruction or attraction to larger galaxies acting on smaller. 

(The intergalactic stellar stream (highlighted) was spotted in galaxy cluster 231 million light-years from Earth. (Image credit: William Herschel Telescope/Román et al.)

The Giant Coma stream, however, is apparently a very fragile structure, composed of mutually attracting and repelling galaxies.  Modern science would expect such a constellation to be torn apart by a larger galaxy, but this has not occurred.  Observing such a phenomenon stretching across galaxies does not prove that your platform (the Earth) is moving.  It simply means you are observing a phenomenon that modern science cannot explain and that your platform might well be immobile and the star stream, pace Mach and Einstein, in relative motion. 

#10 The Doppler Effect

The Doppler Effect (or Doppler Shift) was discovered by Christian Doppler in 1842.  This effect occurs when the source of wave emission moves closer or farther away from the observer.  The waves are compressed when the source moves closer and stretched when the source moves farther away.  This phenomenon does not occur, however, when the receiver moves closer or farther away from a stationary source since the waves coming to the receiver are the same in both cases.  

Light acts in a similar manner.  If the source of light is moving closer to the observer, the light waves are compressed or ‘blue-shifted’; while if the source of light is moving farther away from the observer, the light waves are stretched or ‘red-shifted’.  More