Skip to main content

The Doppler Effect At The Speed Of Light

We all are familiar with the Doppler Effect.  It is why when an emergency vehicle has the sirens on the pitch of the sirens drops as the vehicle passes you.

(The difference in speed between you and the emergency vehicle either compress or elongates the sound waves from the siren which changes the pitch of what you hear.)

Hubble space telescope was used to identify other galaxies and thanks you certain types of stars that burn with a known standard brightness.  NASA scientists were then able to detect shifts in the standard color of the light to know what direction the other galaxies were moving in relation to us.  This means that the Doppler Effect works with light waves too!  (And now the science gets crazy)

The light from a galaxy moving away from us shifts to the red and a galaxy moving towards would shift to the violet.  Just with sound the faster the speed towards or away from us the more the light would shift either towards red or violet.  The closer you get to the speed of light in a direction away from the light source the light waves you see appear to elongate until it is no longer an energy wave.  (As you accelerate away from the light source the visible light from the source would shift to red, then become detectable only in infrared and eventually as a radio wave until it was no longer detectable as a wave once you match light speed with the light wave.)

Here is the real question.  The waves that were not detectable before because they were past violet... those will pass through the visible spectrum at some point.  What would it look like?  When the Gamma Ray background radiation that has been detected at every direction in the known universe comes in to focus as visible light, at least the portions of it you are moving away from, what do you see?

As you continue to accelerate towards the speed of light, the light that was traveling perpendicular to you would not shift on the spectrum or at least not by as much as light traveling in the same or opposite direction as you.

Imagine what we would see if there was a different perspective on the electro-magnetic spectrum.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

American Pride, The Memoir of a Future President, Part 2 Go Planet!

 It's no surprise that I came to the book "50 Things Kids Can Do To Save The World".  The world decided for me that I was going to be an environmentalist.  Some of my first and most indelible memories are images of oil spills in the Gulf of Mexico.  The dead birds, fish, ect... covered in oil all from ONE  accident.   Like many young Michiganders I grew up spending many a hot summer day on the beaches of Lake Michigan.  Too see an area similar to one of my happy places turned to ruin in days... leaves a mark on your brain similar to the first time your family pet dies.  I love this and something terrible has happened to it. You have to treasure the good things in your life while you have them, and that includes the natural beauty around you.  That was something I learned early. It is also true that kids latch on to things and don't let them go.  I got in to recycling, big time.  The local community waste transfer center started...
Post a Comment
Read more

Ideas primary

There is only 18 months to the next US presidential election so naturally the campaigning is already in full swing.  😒 The Democrats are doing something right now called an Ideas Primary, which I kind of love the idea of.  One of the things that America as a whole needs is a an open stage to throw out ideas and have a robust conversation about the direction of the country. The trouble is that a lot of the new progressives that have been elected back in the midterm election last November are being treated as fringe candidates with fringe ideas and those ideas are not getting talked about in this ideas primary.  If it wasn't for Bernie Sanders we probably wouldn't even be talking about Medicare For All, and it is troubling for me that there isn't much talk about a Green New Deal. I think what I would really like to see in an ideas primary is a town hall where organizers from the Black Lives Matter, The Parkland Students, Greta Thunberg or someone like her, someone th...
Post a Comment
Read more

American League Division Series, Detroit vs Cleveland

 You know what's great about this series?  Two teams from two cities in an area the coastal folks call "the rust belt" but should be better known as the Great Lakes Watershed. Detroit has been through some really tough times in the last 30 years, you'll have that when all of your economic base leaves for cheaper labor markets. Cleveland has been through some really tough times in the last 30 years, you'll have that when your economic base pollutes the land and waterways so badly the river catches on fire regularly. These are major American cities, both of them degraded by decades of corporations chasing cheap labor,  lacks environmental protections, pre-1970s, that left a scarred landscape that 50 years of the clean water, clear air, RCRA, and Superfund sites has only recently started to show real improvement.  And lets not forget the trade deals that hollowed out Detroit and Cleveland for imports from China and Mexico. Detroit and Cleveland... I think you mean th...
Post a Comment
Read more