A unified treatment of the redshift, the Doppler effect, and the time dilation in general relativity

TL;DR

This paper offers a comprehensive framework in general relativity that unifies the understanding of redshift, Doppler effect, and time dilation, extending previous models and deriving special relativistic effects without Lorentz transformations.

Contribution

It generalizes the unified approach to redshift and Doppler effects, explicitly includes time dilation in gravitational fields, and derives special relativistic effects within a general relativistic framework.

Findings

Unified treatment of redshift, Doppler effect, and time dilation.

Derivation of special relativistic effects without Lorentz transformations.

Application to moving clocks in gravitational and elliptical orbits.

Abstract

We present a unified treatment of the gravitational and cosmological redshift, the Doppler effect due to the moving observer or light source, and the time dilation in the gravitational field in the framework of general relativity. The primary purpose of this paper is to extend the description of Narlikar (1994) on the unified approach towards the redshifts and the Doppler effect in a more generalized form, with the help of the four facts extracted from the comprehensive review article by Ellis (1971). We apply it to the cases of moving observer or light source in the gravitational field and obtain the Doppler effect term, in addition to the standard gravitational or cosmological redshift. The secondary purpose is to explicitly show that the time dilation of a moving clock in the gravitational field can also be understood within the same framework of the unified treatment. We examine the time dilation of the moving clock on geodesic in the gravitational field. We also derive the time dilation of the moving clock on elliptical orbit, based on the same unified treatment. The tertiary purpose is to show that we can understand special-relativistic effects without using the Lorentz transformation. We derive the special-relativistic formulae such as the Doppler effect and aberration of light, the kinetic time dilation, and the Lorentz contraction in the general-relativistic framework.