- #141
Drakkith
Mentor
- 23,106
- 7,502
bahamagreen said:I thought he was including the relativistic length contraction... the farther we look, the faster things are receding, so their longitudinal diameters are seen as contracted, as is the space between them, as would be the meter sticks they hold out there to measure things... wouldn't the measure of distance used locally at those distant objects appear to have changed (our view would be that their meters are (were?) contracted compared to ours), right?
I'm not sure we'd see any length contraction since they are moving directly away from us and length contraction acts in the direction of motion. I also don't think the space between moving objects is contracted either. If we take two spacecraft at rest and separated by 10 km, relative to another stationary observer, and then accelerate those two ships in the direction perpendicular to the line of sight between them and the observer until they are close to the speed of light, they will be noticeably length contracted but I don't think the distance between them will have changed.