Edwin hubble's famous experiment...
he let the light of a star on a spectrometer, what he noticed is that the light is shifting to red.. and this means that us and the star are getting farther apart. And so are the rest of the cosmic bodies. Everything in the universe (galaxies, stars, black holes) is moving apart, which then gave us a prediction of the expanding universe.
Edit: the frequency (or number of waves per second) of light is extremely high ranging between four and seven hundred million million waves per a second, the different frequencies of light are what humans eyes see as colors, the lowest frequencies appear red and the highest appear blue..
there's a good explanation of the idea of a Red shift :
Let's say you're standing still. Cars are coming down the road once every second. Now you get in your bicycle and try to race them. You aren't fast enough to win so they keep passing you. They pass you less often though. Their frequency has gone down. That's a red doppler shift.
Likewise, in astronomy light from stars is coming at us. The Earth is getting farther from most of them because the universe is expanding, so their frequency goes down.