Question

So I have learned in class that light can get red-shifted as it travels through space. As I understand it, space itself expands and stretches out the wavelength of the light. This results in the light having a lower frequency which equates to lowering its energy.

My question is, where does the energy of the light go? Energy must go somewhere!

Does the energy the light had before go into the mechanism that's expanding the space? I'm imagining that light is being stretched out when its being red-shifted. So would this mean that the energy is still there and that it is just spread out over more space?

Answer 1

the photons - e.g. cosmic microwave background photons - are increasing their wavelength proportionally to the linear expansion of the Universe, a(t), and their energy correspondingly drops as 1/a(t). Where does the energy go? It just disappears.

Energy is not conserved in cosmology.

Much more generally, the total energy conservation law becomes either invalid or vacuous in general relativity unless one guarantees that physics occurs in an asymptotically flat - or another asymptotically static - Universe. That's because the energy conservation law arises from the time-translational symmetry, via Noether's theorem, and this symmetry is broken in generic situations in general relativity. See

http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/08/why-and-how-energy-is-not-conserved-in.html
Why energy is not conserved in cosmology

Cosmic inflation is the most extreme example - the energy density stays constant (a version of the cosmological constant with a very high value) but the total volume of the Universe exponentially grows, so the total energy exponentially grows, too. That's why Alan Guth, the main father of inflation, said that "the Universe is the ultimate free lunch". This mechanism (inflation) able to produce exponentially huge masses in a reasonable time frame is the explanation why the mass of the visible Universe is so much greater than the Planck mass, a natural microscopic unit of mass.