Imagine the Universe!

Doppler Shift Quiz

  1. While waiting for your bus you hear in the distance the familiar drone of its engine. After a short while the tone begins to sound lower and lower. Knowing about it's Doppler shift, what should you do?





  2. Your youngest sibling is amazingly able to produce a long steady whine for hours on end. While trying to hide from her, you hear the pitch of the iritable noise increase and then decrease. What has just happened?





  3. While driving your car, you are stopped for running a red light. You tell the police officer that because of the Doppler shift, the red light (650 nm) was blueshifted to a green light (470 nm) as you drove towards the stop light. How fast would you have to be going in order for this to be true? (use the non-relativistic Doppler shift equation)





Imagine the Universe is a service of the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC), Dr. Nicholas White (Director), within the Laboratory for High Energy Astrophysics at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

The Imagine Team
Project Leader: Dr. Jim Lochner
All material on this site has been created and updated between 1997-2004.

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