Abstract

Stellar aberration, discovered three centuries ago, was immediately recognized as a phenomenon due to the velocity of the Earth in its orbit around the Sun. Einstein explained aberration by using the Lorentz transformations to convert from stellar coordinates to earth coordinates unequivocally using the relative velocity of Earth and star, and his explanation remains essentially the same in most textbooks. We show herein, by analyzing data from binary stars, that aberration is not due to relative velocity of Earth with respect to star, but rather Earth's orbital velocity.