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BALLISTICS AND SPACE (published in the "Engineer" magazine # 4, 2009) - Oh, ballistics, ballistics! Jules Verne "From Earth to the Moon" Thanks to Jules Verne, space has long been associated with ballistics - the science of the movement of bullets and projectiles [1]. This connection can be traced even in the names: ballistic missiles, "Star Wars", Big Bang. But the ballistic theory suddenly turns out to be applicable even to such mysteries of space as explosive supernovae, pulsars, Cepheids and the redshift of galaxies, which is believed to be caused by the Doppler effect. Everyone knows the Doppler effect. It is he who underlies the work of the "radar", familiar to any car enthusiast. But few people know about another curious effect akin to Doppler. We are talking about the Ritz effect, discovered a century ago, but never recognized by science. The Doppler effect is illustrated by the following example (Fig. 1). Imagine a car going towards an observer. Due to the movement, the headlights of the car will seem a little blue to him than in reality. If the car is carried away, the light of its taillights, on the contrary, will seem a little redder than real: the movement changes the frequency of the light. This is due to the fact that when driving, the distance between the car and the observer changes. Therefore, two successive signals, say two shots from a car, fired at an interval of a second, will travel this distance at different times. So, when firing from a car going to the observer at a speed of 30 m/s, the second bullet will have to fly 30 meters less. Therefore, with a bullet speed of 300 m/s, the second bullet will win a tenth of a second at this distance. This difference in travel times will shorten the period between signals for the observer: the bullets will follow with an interval of 0.9 seconds instead of 1 s. Similarly, for light, which is a flying sequence of wave fronts, the movement transforms the period and repetition rate of pulses, wave crests, that is, changes the color of the light. Fig. 1. Doppler effect - the change in the frequency of light from movement. 1 The Ritz effect is similar to the Doppler effect, but its nature is somewhat different. According to Ritz, the movement of the source also creates the illusion of color change in the observer (not even color blind). But if in the Doppler effect the speed of the source affected the frequency of light, then in the Ritz effect acceleration affects. In other words, according to Ritz, the color of the headlights will change even in a car that has not picked up speed, but has just “pulled away” from its place. The effect is explained by the same two signals given by the car. Since the speed of the car that started accelerating is not high, the signals will have to travel almost the same distance. However, due to the acceleration, the speed of the second signal will be slightly higher than that of the first. This means that here, too, the signals will take different time to cover the distance. For the observer, the period between the signals will change again, the frequency of their repetition and the color of light will be transformed (Fig. 2). Fig. 2. The Ritz effect - the change in the frequency of light from acceleration. Moving away, the car, having gained speed V after a time T, reports it to bullet No. 2. It gradually catches up with No. 1. As a result, the bullets come with a gap T'<T. Let, for example, these signals again be two pistol shots at the pole. The first shot is fired from a vehicle that has barely started accelerating and therefore has zero speed. Then the first bullet will move towards the pillar with a standard shot speed C = 300 m/s, having traveled the distance L = 900 m to the pillar in L/C = 3 seconds. When, after the first shot, after a time T = 1 s, the second is fired, the machine, having an acceleration a = 10 m/s2, will pick up the speed V = aT = 10 m/s. The car will additionally report this movement to the second bullet, so that its speed will already be C+V = 310 m/s, and the travel time will become L/(C+V) = 2.9 s, which is approximately by the value of LV/C2= 0.1 second less than the flight duration of the first bullet. Consequently, the bullets will come to the column with a gap T'=T- LV/C2=T(1–La/C2)= 0.9 s, less than the initial T = 1 s. Conversely, if the acceleration a of the car is directed away from the pillar, then reducing the speed of the second 2 bullet by 10 m/s (C-V= 290 m/s) will increase the time gap T' between the arrival of bullets by 0.1 seconds: T'=T(1+La/C2)= 1.1 s. It was this formula that was derived for the world by the Swiss physicist Walter Ritz (1878-1909) back in 1908. In his formula, C is the speed of light, T is the period of light oscillations, an increase in which means reddening of the light, and a decrease in it - blue. Immediately striking is the difference between the Ritz effect and the Doppler effect: in addition to the fact that the frequency of light depends on acceleration, it is also affected by the distance L of the source. This dependence of the color shift of an object on its distance is quite remarkable. For a sophisticated reader, it will immediately suggest Hubble's law, according to which the reddening (increase in the period T and wavelength λ) of the light of distant galaxies is also proportional to the distance L to them: T'=T(1+LH/C), where the coefficient H = 55 (km/s)/Mpc is called the Hubble constant [2]. It is believed that the reddening is caused by the Doppler effect: the color of galaxies changes due to their movement, "running away" from us. Previously, scientists disliked the artificiality of such an explanation, because, firstly, it was not clear why galaxies would fly apart, since gravitational forces act between them, and secondly, it came out from Hubble's law that the speed of expansion of galaxies grows with their distance from us, which there was no reason either. Today's scientists have come to terms with such a far-fetched explanation and even fitted a theoretical basis for it. But the former took it with hostility and believed that the reason was in a different effect - in the gradual reddening, aging of light as it moved. This idea was first expressed by our astrophysicist A.A. Belopolsky (1854-1934), who did a lot to substantiate the Doppler effect. And Belopolsky would be right if the Ritz effect is real. Indeed, according to Ritz, this is how it turns out: the further the light goes from the source, the more blue or red it will become. So, if in the example with bullets the second has a lower speed, then as it moves it will lag more and more behind the first, increasing the distance. The length of the light wave also increases, which leads to a gradual reddening of the light of galaxies. For this, the galaxy needs only to have acceleration. And it is present because all galaxies rotate. Rotational centripetal acceleration in the brightest part of galaxies, in their spherical core, is directed in the same direction as the gravitational force - to the center of the galactic nucleus. Therefore, no matter how the galaxy is turned, in the visible and brightest part of the nucleus closest to us, the acceleration is always directed away from us. (The reverse side of the nuclei, where the acceleration is directed towards us, cannot be seen from their opacity.) That is, the Ritz effect leads precisely to an increase in the period and reddening of the light (Fig. 3). And the degree of redness exactly coincides with that found from the Hubble law. 3 Fig. 3. Redshift in the spectra of the nuclei of distant galaxies as a consequence of the Ritz effect caused by their rotation. Indeed, if galaxies “turn red” due to the Ritz effect, then the Hubble constant is H=a/С, that is, it is equal to the ratio of acceleration to the speed of light (C= 300000 km/s). Since the accelerations (a=V2/R) in our and other galaxies are approximately the same, we get: H=V2/RС. Here V is the circumferential velocity of stars in the core of the Galaxy, equal to 183 km/s, R is the radius of their orbit, or the radius of the core, which is about 2000 parsecs for our and other galaxies, or 0.002 Mpc. Substituting these values, we find the value H= 56 (km/s)/Mpc, which is very close to the measured value of the Hubble constant of 55 (km/s)/Mpc, drawn, like other data, from the reference book "Alpha and Omega" [2, from. 34]. So, the redshift may turn out to be a simple consequence of the Ritz effect, and not the illusory scattering of galaxies from the Big Bang. 4 Fig. 4. Ballistic principle: speed gain from a ray of light C to the value of the speed V of the source. The analogy of firing a machine gun and a ray gun with armored car on the move or from a flying fighter.