If light traveled far enough, would it get “red-shifted” to the point of no longer being a wave?

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From what I understand, red-shifting is when light from a distant source travels through expanding space which stretches out the wave making it appear more red by the time it reaches earth.

So if a light wave traveled far enough, would it “red-shift” all the way down the EM spectrum eventually losing its waviness and becoming a straight line?

In: Physics

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Anonymous 0 Comments

The decrease is exponential, the light loses a certain percentage of energy per time (assuming constant expansion of the universe). So it does, say, double the wavelength every billion years So it gets indeed larger and larger, without any boundary; but it never truly reaches infinity, becoming straight.

Maybe you can imagine the process as if the wiggling wave thing gets stretched with space, becoming lengthier; but to stretch it straight, space would have to increase infinitely.

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