Why is it called blue shift instead of violet shift?

Question

I've always wondered that, red is at the end of the visible light spectrum, but blue is just kind of a random place. Violet makes sense, because that's also the end, I guess. Any great reasons why? And how do you know this information?

Sheesh, tell me something I don't know.

Answer 1

It is conventional. It is easier to talk about visible light.Red vs blue, two opposite end of visible light spectrum, were used to tell if the source is receding (red), or approaching(blue). The shift of spectrum is either called red shift or blue shift.

Answer 2

This is a good point. Red is at one end of the spectrum and violet is at the other.

We see red shifts when things move away from us, and blue shifts when things move towards us. But most of the objects in the universe are moving away from us, because the universe is expanding. So we don't see too many blue shifts, and the average speeds of blue shifts are much lower than those of red shifts.

That means that we're not going to see very pronounced blue shifts most of the time... which is why they tend to be blue and not violet. A speed that causes the light from a whitish star to look violet would be very very fast, speeds that we almost never see. Pushing a white star into the blue range is less of a shift and is observed much, much more frequently.

So we call it a blue shift, because that is what they tend to look like to us.

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BTW, Indigo isn't really a colour of the spectrum. Isaac Newton divided the spectrum into seven colours because he believed in numerology and thought the number six was evil. So he added a seventh colour - indigo. But modern science no longer recognizes indigo as a colour of the spectrum - it is merely a shade of blue.

Answer 3

It probably has to do with that our eyes are more sensitive to blue then violet. For example when we watch a flame heat up, our eyes will see it will go from red, to yellow, to blue. You'd be hard to pressed to find a normal flame that is green or violet (they exist but that's because of other reasons then the behind that then just the heat of the flame).

Answer 4

could besides circulate all the way and phone it gamma shift as against radio shift. it incredibly is all an analogous electromagnetic spectrum. A photon is a photon, even a radio photon is an analogous sort of photon as mild. yet, on the time it became into named, blue appeared like a shorter moniker and nevertheless conveyed the belief of "the different direction than pink-shift". a minimum of, it incredibly is not as undesirable as announcing "going up north", as quickly as all of us understand that the polar radius of Earth is decrease than the equatorial radius. as quickly as we circulate north, we get closer to Earth's centre: we are, subsequently, going "down".

Answer 5

you are right... classically the seven spectra colors are (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet)... blue is third from the end.

i tend to believe its an intensity thing... the human eye can see farther into violet than you expect, but the colors get fainter and fainter.

Its sorta RED, BLUE, violet

Answer 6

well, the light wave your talking about is actually called ultraviolet.

and on the opposite side its infrared.

its not called an infrared shift either.

blue and red is just easier.
plus I believe they're talking about visible light anyhow.

Answer 7

ITS because our eye is more sensitive to blue than Violet.
the same is the reason for blue sky.
from physics book XII.