DOUBLE STARS AND THE MISSING EVIDENCE

There are no "fixed" stars. They all have their velocities, but they are so far away they appear fixed in the same place. In any case, as far as we are concerned, their velocity is constant, so that on subtracting the summer from the winter aberration it will just cancel out.

But about half the stars in the sky, it is estimated, are double stars or binaries, with two stars orbiting a common center of mass. These stars do not, of course, have a constant velocity, and if Einstein were right, the relative velocity of each star and Earth would not cancel out during half a terrestrial year; a periodic component (period of the binary) would appear even in the instantaneous aberration. To make the effect observable, one must choose a binary with a very short period, comparable to the Earth's (one year). That means the two stars must be very dose together, and that in turn means giant telescopes with a sufficiently strong resolving power. Such telescopes came into existence at a time when the Einstein theory was already well enthroned and explains why such investigations were not carried out earlier.

In any case, if Einstein were right, the increased aberration would be at least 20 times larger than the resolving power of modern telescopes. What is more, by contemporary automated methods of scanning the sky, such a wildly larger aberration would register an "alarm" even if they were not looked for.

But there have been no such "alarms" from anywhere in the sky. No periodic components predicted by the theory of relativity have been observed.

Einstein was in error. His theory is dead, though it will take decades to bury it among the grieving hagiographers.

[What theory does explain aberration correctly? Mine, for example, of light having a constant velocity in the local gravitational field, but that is not the point here.]