Some people are good at telling other people’s ages. They can look at you and know you are 9 years old or 22 or 49 or 99. How? They read the clues: your size, shape, whether your hair is gray (or gone), wrinkles, how you talk, and how you act.
Astronomers can tell the ages of galaxies—or least the ages of the galaxies’ light. A galaxy is a grouping of stars bound together by gravity. All but a few stars in the universe live in galaxies. Our Sun is just one of at least 200 billion stars in our own Milky Way Galaxy.
What clues do astronomers use to tell the age of a galaxy?
Light travels in waves, like energy moves through the ocean in waves. Light waves change as they travel through space and time. That is because space itself is always expanding and stretching the distances between things. So the light waves traveling through this expanding space become themselves expanded.
No matter what, light always travels at the same speed in space: 300,000 kilometers (or 186,000 miles) per second (in round numbers). That means it takes some amount of time—a little or a lot—for light to get anywhere. The distance light can travel in one Earth year is called a light year. A light year is very long distance: around 9 trillion kilometers (6 trillion miles). That's a 9 (or a 6) with 12 zeroes after it!
Light waves from a very distant galaxy that have been traveling a long, long time (say, billions of years) starts looking very stretched out! Astronomers say that the light is red-shifted, because red light has the longest, most "stretched out" waves of all the colors of the light we can see with our eyes.
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