Redshift - History

History

The history of the subject began with the development in the 19th century of wave mechanics and the exploration of phenomena associated with the Doppler effect. The effect is named after Christian Doppler, who offered the first known physical explanation for the phenomenon in 1842. The hypothesis was tested and confirmed for sound waves by the Dutch scientist Christophorus Buys Ballot in 1845. Doppler correctly predicted that the phenomenon should apply to all waves, and in particular suggested that the varying colors of stars could be attributed to their motion with respect to the Earth. While this attribution turned out to be incorrect (stellar colors are indicators primarily of a star's temperature, not motion) Doppler would later be vindicated by verified redshift observations.

The first Doppler redshift was described by French physicist Hippolyte Fizeau in 1848, who pointed to the shift in spectral lines seen in stars as being due to the Doppler effect. The effect is sometimes called the "Doppler–Fizeau effect". In 1868, British astronomer William Huggins was the first to determine the velocity of a star moving away from the Earth by this method. In 1871, optical redshift was confirmed when the phenomenon was observed in Fraunhofer lines using solar rotation, about 0.1 Å in the red. In 1887, Vogel and Scheiner discovered the annual Doppler effect, the yearly change in the Doppler shift of stars located near the ecliptic due to the orbital velocity of the Earth. In 1901, Aristarkh Belopolsky verified optical redshift in the laboratory using a system of rotating mirrors.

The earliest occurrence of the term "red-shift" in print (in this hyphenated form), appears to be by American astronomer Walter S. Adams in 1908, where he mentions "Two methods of investigating that nature of the nebular red-shift". The word doesn't appear unhyphenated until about 1934 by Willem de Sitter, perhaps indicating that up to that point its German equivalent, Rotverschiebung, was more commonly used.

Beginning with observations in 1912, Vesto Slipher discovered that most spiral nebulae had considerable redshifts. Slipher first reports on his measurement in the inaugural volume of the Lowell Observatory Bulletin. Three years later, he wrote a review in the journal Popular Astronomy. In it he states, " the early discovery that the great Andromeda spiral had the quite exceptional velocity of –300 km(/s) showed the means then available, capable of investigating not only the spectra of the spirals but their velocities as well." Slipher reported the velocities for 15 spiral nebulae spread across the entire celestial sphere, all but three having observable "positive" (that is recessional) velocities. Subsequently, Edwin Hubble discovered an approximate relationship between the redshifts of such "nebulae" (now known to be galaxies in their own right) and the distances to them with the formulation of his eponymous Hubble's law. These observations corroborated Alexander Friedman's 1922 work, in which he derived the famous Friedmann equations. They are today considered strong evidence for an expanding universe and the Big Bang theory.