Red Shift Research Paper

If you have been doing much reading on astronomy, you have probably come across the term "red shift". When astronomers are explaining how far away a distant object is, they will usually say something like "The red shift of the galaxy (or other object) indicates that it is about 4 billion light years away". What does "red shift" mean, and how can it tell us how far away an object is?
Since most of the things we look at in the sky are so far away, we cannot visit them and find out what they are made of, what temperature they are and so on. The way that scientists decide what a distant star is made of, how hot it is and other things is to study the light that the star gives off. The study of light is called spectrography. By making careful observations of the light that a star gives off, or the light that is reflected from a planet, scientists can find out a lot of information about
We have all heard a police car with its siren on go by. You have probably also noticed that if the police car is moving towards us, the pitch of the siren is higher than it is when the police car is moving away. To make a long story short, this effect is what is known as the "Doppler Effect".
The question that you have right now is "What does a siren have to do with a distant star?". The answer is that light behaves same way that the siren does. Instead of the sound changing, though, the color of light from an object changes by a very small amount, depending on whether the object is moving closer to us or further away. By the way, an object has to be moving very, very fast in order for the light to change color even a little.

The first step in our explanation of red shift is a look at the colors that our eyes can see. In the picture above, you can see what looks a little like a rainbow. The colors start at red on the left side of the picture and go all the way to blue on the right