The 4% Universe: Dark Matter, Dark Energy, and the Race to Discover the Rest of Reality

by Richard Panek

In 1912 the American Vesto Slipher began examining the nebulae with a spectrograph, an instrument that registers the wavelengths from a source of light. Much like the sound waves of a train whistle as the train approaches or departs from a station, light waves are compressed or stretched—they bunch up or elongate—depending on whether the source of the light is moving toward you or away from you. The speed of the light waves doesn’t change; it remains 186,282 miles (or 299,792 kilometers) per second. What changes is the length of the waves. And because the length of the light waves determines the colors that our eyes perceive, the color of the source of light also seems to change. If the source of light is moving toward you, the waves bunch up, and the spectrometer will show a shift toward the blue end of the spectrum. If the source of light is moving away from you, the waves relax, and the spectrometer will show a shift toward the red end of the spectrum. And as the velocity of the source of light as it moves toward you or away from you increases, so does the blueshift or redshift—the greater the velocity, the greater the shift.