I thought “red shift” indicated movement away from the observer, blue shift was movement towards the observer just like the Doppler effect. This article states it is ancient light.
>>>>I thought “red shift” indicated movement away from the observer, blue shift was movement towards the observer just like the Doppler effect. This article states it is ancient light.
AP and Yahoo both dumb things down. Most people don’t understand the Doppler effect—to them it has something to do with the weather....
Red shifted light is the characteristic of both ancient and very distant sources simultaneously, due to the expanding universe. The further away the source, the faster it is receding from us. Gravitational effects also affect redshift, according to General Relativity.
So, they infer distance from, among other things, the amount of red shift. In fact the furthest known sources have red shifts of orders of magnitude, all the way into the microwave region. This is the explanation mooted for the so-called Cosmic Background radiation, which is believed to be left over from the “Big Bang,” and thus the oldest (and the most redshifted) radiation we can observe.
I think the article was just being brief, perhaps out of necessity.