Galilean and relativistic Doppler/aberration effects deduced from spherical and ellipsoidal wavefronts respectively (2109.15072v1)

Abstract: The diagram showing off-center nested spheres which is traditionally used to illustrate the Doppler effect, is misleading and its trigonometric analysis leads to errors concerning light, because electromagnetic Doppler and aberration effects conform to a wavefront surface that is not a sphere but an ellipsoid stretched along the trajectory of the source. The Cartesian and polar equations of the spherical and ellipsoidal wavefronts are compared here and related to their respective angular Doppler functions. As wavefront surfaces directly link inter-frame coordinate transformations to the aberrations they generate, the simple analysis of their geometry is sufficient to find exact results of special relativity and incidentally to revise the classical aberration formula.