For a long time Bradley pondered over this observation, and over others like them which he also made. He found one group of stars describing small circles, while others at a distance from them were oscillating in straight lines, and all the others were describing ellipses. Unless this state of things were cleared up, accurate astronomy was impossible. The fixed stars!—they were not fixed a bit. To refined and accurate observation, such as was now possible, they were all careering about in little orbits having a reference to the earth's year, besides any proper motion which they might really have of their own, though no such motion was at present known. Not till Herschel was that discovered; not till this extraordinary aberration was allowed for could it be discovered. The effect observed by Bradley and Molyneux must manifestly be only an apparent motion: it was absurd to suppose a real stellar motion regulating itself according to the position of the earth. Parallax could not do it, for that would displace stars relatively among each other—it would not move similarly a set of neighbouring stars.
At length, four years after the observation, the explanation struck him, while in a boat upon the Thames. He noticed the apparent direction of the wind changed whenever the boat started. The wind veered when the boat's motion changed. Of course the cause of this was obvious enough—the speed of the wind and the speed of the boat were compounded, and gave an apparent direction of the wind other than the true direction. But this immediately suggested a cause for what he had observed in the heavens. He had been observing an apparent direction of the stars other than the true direction, because he was observing from a moving vehicle. The real direction was doubtless fixed: the apparent direction veered about with the motion of the earth. It must be that light did not travel instantaneously, but gradually, as Roemer had surmised fifty years ago; and that the motion of the light was compounded with the motion of the earth.
Think of a stream of light or anything else falling on a moving carriage. The carriage will run athwart the stream, the occupants of the carriage will mistake its true direction. A rifle fired through the windows of a railway carriage by a man at rest outside would make its perforations not in the true line of fire unless the train is stationary. If the train is moving, the line joining the holes will point to a place in advance of where the rifle is really located.
So it is with the two glasses of a telescope, the object-glass and eye-piece, which are pierced by the light; an astronomer, applying his eye to the tube and looking for the origin of the disturbance, sees it apparently, but not in its real position—its apparent direction is displaced in the direction of the telescope's motion; by an amount depending on the ratio of the velocity of the earth to the velocity of light, and on the angle between those two directions.
Fig. 78.—Aberration diagram. The light-ray L penetrates the object-glass of the moving telescope at O, but does not reach the eye-piece until the telescope has travelled to the second position. Consequently a moving telescope does not point out the true direction of the light, but aims at a point a little in advance.
But how minute is the displacement! The greatest effect is obtained when the two motions are at right angles to each other, i.e. when the star seen is at right angles to the direction of the earth's motion, but even then it is only 20", or 1⁄180th part of a degree; one-ninetieth of the moon's apparent diameter. It could not be detected without a cross-wire in the telescope, and would only appear as a slight displacement from the centre of the field, supposing the telescope accurately pointed to the true direction.
But if this explanation be true, it at once gives a method of determining the velocity of light. The maximum angle of deviation, represented as a ratio of arc ÷ radius, amounts to
| 1 | – ·0001 = | 1 |
| 180 × 57⅓ | 10,000 |