A star is moving toward Earth with a radial velocity (speed directly toward or away from Earth) of 40,000 km/s. If we take a spectrum of this star’s light, will we find it to be red shifted or blue shifted? By what fraction are the wavelengths in this star’s spectrum shifted?
Stellar evolution
We may see thousands of stars in the dark sky. Our universe consists of billions of stars. Stars may appear tiny to us but they are huge balls of gasses. Sun is a star of average size. Some stars are even a thousand times larger than the sun. The stars do not exist forever they have a certain lifetime. The life span of the sun is about 10 billion years. The star undergoes various changes during its lifetime, this process is called stellar evolution. The structure of the sun-like star is shown below.
Red Shift
It is an astronomical phenomenon. In this phenomenon, increase in wavelength with corresponding decrease in photon energy and frequency of radiation of light. It is the displacement of spectrum of any kind of astronomical object to the longer wavelengths (red) side.
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A star is moving toward Earth with a radial velocity (speed directly toward or away from Earth) of 40,000 km/s. If we take a spectrum of this star’s light, will we find it to be red shifted or blue shifted? By what fraction are the wavelengths in this star’s spectrum shifted? [Answer: λ0/λ = 0.88]
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