Red-shift

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05:41

Description

The title of this video belies its truly mind-boggling signficance.  In 1927, Belgian priest and physicist Georges Lemaître solved Einstein’s equations of general relativity and predicted that the universe was expanding.  Shortly after, this remarkable prediction was confirmed by the observations of the American astronomer Edwin Hubble.  Today, the fact that the wavelength of the light we receive from distant stars is longer than expected (in other words, that it is red-shifted) remains among the most convincing evidence we have that space itself is actually expanding, and that, roughly 13.8 billion years ago, at the time of the Big Bang, it was all squashed up into a tiny, super-hot region.  Isn’t life strange?

Key Words

speed, wavelength, red-shift, Big Bang, expanding, universe, space, dark matter, dark energy