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102

It does! However it doesn't change the frequency enough to matter. An FM transmission is not a precise frequency. Instead it spans a range of about 100 or 200kHz depending on which country you are in. So your FM radio actually accepts a range of frequencies either side of the central frequency. Let's suppose you're travelling at the maximum speed permitted ...

29

To further add to John Rennie's answer: you don't even need autotuning for a frequency drift of the magnitude John calculates (10Hz): all FM receivers I've ever dealt with (I qualified as an electrical engineer in 1985 and worked a few short years in communications before returning to study) demodulated with a phase locked loop detector, whose job it is to ...

24

Yes, gravitational waves will undergo the same red-shift as any wave that propagates at $c$. There were probably very violent gravitational waves in the very early universe. If those waves hadn't been red-shifted, they'd be ripping us apart right now. If so, could observations of them be used like red-shifted electromagnetic waves from distant sources ...

19

John and Rod already pointed out that the expected frequency shift from driving a car is "small"; I would like to expand a little more on the way FM works. FM = Frequency Modulation. The carrier (nominal center frequency) is being modulated - that is, in order to convey the audio content, the frequency is actually moving around deliberately in order to get ...

12

You do see the Doppler shift of the Earth's motion with respect to the CMB. It imprints a dipole component on the CMB temperature map. The motion of the Earth around the Sun is a modest 30 km/s, but even this doppler shifts inferred temperatures by a factor $\simeq v/c$ and needs to be taken out of the CMB analysis. A larger effect is the motion of the Sun ...

8

Yes, the sound can be reversed. Thanks to JiK, we have this animation (Python source code) of a supersonic jet moving forwards that can illuminate what is going on: The red circle represents the first sound produced by the object, the blue circle the second sound produced by the object and the remaining (black) circles representing the sounds produced ...

8

There are numerous distance indicators used for within the galaxy. The most common way is by using intrinsic magnitude. By knowing how bright an object would be if we were close, we can determine how far away it is by how dim it is. There are many types of stars where we have a rough idea of how bright they should be due to characteristics of the star: ...

7

why do textbooks never mention this? Because in order to travel at supersonic speeds, human beings must be enclosed in a rigid metal tube of some sort. Also, these metal tubes they ride in at those speeds generally tend to be insulated against noise from the outside. As for trying to place some sort of microphone outside said metal tube, the ...

7

You can derive the relativistic Doppler shift from the Lorentz transformations. Let's start in the frame of the moving rocket, and let's take two events corresponding to nodes in the emitted wave (i.e. 1/$f$). Then in the rocket's frame the two events are (0, 0) and ($\tau$, 0), where $\tau$ is the period of the radiated wave. To see what the period of the ...

7

According to Bohr model, the absorption and emission lines should be infinitely narrow, because there is only one discrete value for the energy. There are few mechanism on broadening the line width - natural line width, Lorentz pressure broadening, Doppler broadening, Stark and Zeeman broadening etc. Only the first one isn't described in Bohr theory - it's ...

6

The answer is yes, the atom does absorb radiation that does not exactly match the transistion frequency. This is due to the Doppler effect that everyone knows from an ambulance with siren driving by. The frequency you hear is higher if the ambulance moves towards you and lower if it drives away from you. It's the same with the atom. If the atom moves (and ...

6

I believe CuriousOne is correct, however it does not make any sense to define the threshold frequency for the photoelectric effect in anything but the rest frame of the metal. From the rest frame of the spaceship, the metal plate is rushing towards it and the apparent threshold frequency is lowered, but an occupant of the spaceship should realise that this ...

6

The first image shows an object traveling at Mach 1 ($v=c$). The second one shows the object traveling at some supersonic velocity ($v>c$). For both the cases, the longitudinal pressure waves pile up. Say the observer is standing in the ground and the object is traveling at $c$. The observer can't hear the pitch of sound because, the waves reach him ...

6

This is a great question, as it is both centrally important to modern astrophysics and cosmology, and it is misunderstood by very many people, including scientists themselves. Now the full, rigorous treatment requires general relativity, which I won't discuss in detail here. However, this is a topic that can be explained somewhat intuitively, so I'll give ...

6

I can't claim any experimental experience in this area (fortunately :-) but I thought it was interesting enough to be worth a bit of Googling. The results suggest there is a difference between shells and bombs. There is an extensive collection of eye witness accounts of WW2 at http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/ww2peopleswar/categories/, and searching this ...

5

What you hear in this experiment is the combination of the Doppler effect and the beat. As John Rennie points out, the frequency change due to the Doppler effect would be hardly audible. However, the frequency between the two tuning forks will now be slightly different, which results in a intensity modulation, called the "beat".

5

The blackbody spectrum of the sun is the following, given $T=5778 K$. I admit I'm just copying from Wikipedia. $$I(\nu,T) =\frac{ 2 h\nu^{3}}{c^2}\frac{1}{ e^{\frac{h\nu}{kT}}-1}$$ The comic suggests that the reflection from scattering transforms the above spectrum by $1/\lambda^4$ (as in, it is multiplied by this). Light is a wave, so $\nu \lambda=c$. ...

5

You can use a reflector with gaps. Then the light from a car will alternate between reflecting and not reflecting at a rate dependent on their velocity towards the reflector. Please excuse my crude diagram: As the car moves right to left, gaps in the reflector will cause it to appear to flash on an off.

5

The word "apparent" means "as observed at a particular point X". Different observers will observe different frequencies depending on their relative velocity to the source. This doesn't change the frequency of the sound that is generated; just the frequency of the sound that arrives at the ear of the observer.

4

The linewidths come out very naturally from Maxwell's Equations by treating the atom as a tiny classical antenna. I do the calculations for the 2p-1s transition in hydrogen on my blogsite here: The Semi-Classical Calculation The idea is that from the Schroedinger equation, the superposition of the s and p states gives you get a tiny oscillating dipole about ...

4

I don't think that would even be considered. If you consider Hubble's law - once we get out of our neighbourhood and into the Hubble flow, then what we see is that identically in every direction, the redshift is proportional to the distance we measure to objects by independent means. An explanation involving roughly stationary objects that emit light with a ...

4

The light curve peaks of Type Ia supernova become broader at higher redshifts. The amount of broadening is in proportion to the amount of redshift $(1+z)$. i.e the cosmological time dilation works exactly as expected for an expanding universe, see for example Blondin et al. (2008). A "gradual redshifting" of light as it travelled a distance does not explain ...

4

The observed redshift of a distant source is given by the sum of its cosmological velocity and its velocity wrt. the local Hubble flow, i.e. its so-called peculiar velocity. That means that if you were able to accelerate the two planets at redshifts $z_1$ and $z_2$ up to velocities such that their relative velocity vanishes, they would measure each others ...

4

I don't think any new means to falsify "tired light" are required, as the present ones are sufficient. I believe the strongest is the following - which is recent in the sense that it has become very strong evidence in the last 15 years. The light curve peaks of Type Ia supernova become broader at higher redshifts. The amount of broadening is exactly in ...

4

The effect you describe exists and is called the dipole anisotropy. A review of its measurement is given in the paper Planck 2013 results. XXVII. Doppler boosting of the CMB: Eppur si muove. The dipole anisotropy allows us to calculate the Earth's peculiar velocity, that is the velocity relative to the comoving frame, and it turns out we're scooting through ...

4

If the car with the siren runs you over you won't be hearing anything after it "passes". By definition the line of travel of the sound source must it intersect the observer. But if you write down the expression for frequency vs time as a function of distance of closest approach you will see that in the limit where that distance becomes zero, the step ...

4

"Relativistic" velocities (velocities in excess of 0.1 c) are not needed. Any velocity difference will do. People use the doppler effect right here on Earth. Some sample uses: Catching speeders. How fast is his fastball? (Very important at this time of year.) Where is that tornado going?

4

There are a few other reasons why we think the universe is expanding. Wikipedia lists and explains them far better than I will ever be able to. One thing though, your ruler is not expanding. The intermolecular forces are making sure the distance between molecules stays the same. Empty space is expanding, expanding essentially the distances between weakly ...

4

Yes it does have an effect as you correctly reasoned and is even used in cold atoms technology where it is known as the Doppler cooling technique.

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