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Can a galaxy's light be redshifted into the infrared range?
The faster a galaxy is moving away from the Earth, the higher the redshift. Does the redshift ever enter into the infrared range? Would this have any bearing on the background radiation observed across the sky?
5 Answers
- 1 decade agoFavourite answer
Absolutely. All wavelengths of the EM radiation from a receeding object gets shifted, in the case of redshift, all the wavelengths get shifted to a longer length... they do not all converge toward red, we just use redshift and blueshift because of the common names for the limiting colors on the edges of the visible part of the spectrum.
- Anonymous1 decade ago
At 10 billion light years, the redshift is about 2. That shifts violet light into the infrared range. At that distance, some of a galaxy's ultraviolet light is in the visible range.
At 12 billion light years, the redshift is about 5. That shifts much of the UV into the infrared range, but the galaxy can still be photographed in visible light.
- zi_xinLv 51 decade ago
Some of the fastest moving object are shifted by more than 90%. This is definitely in the infrared range and beyond. In fact, the oldest radiation is in the microwave range. It is the called the Cosmic Background radiation.
- ?Lv 71 decade ago
Some of the light at the extreme end of the visible red range does get shifted into infrared.
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- 1 decade ago
Yes, that's (one of a few reasons) why the planned replacement for the Hubble- the "James Webb Telescope"- is optimized to "view" in infrared. The most distant galaxies- those so far away that we see them as they were very shortly after the big bang- are red-shifted that far.
