“Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe around him and calls the adventure Science.” – Edwin Powell Hubble
Believe it or not, the vast images of galaxies within the universe were not always available to the public. In fact, not even the scientist knew for sure that other galaxies existed or by what means they would capture images of them. That is, until Edwin Powell Hubble came around with his groundbreaking discovery.
Born in Marshfield, Missouri in 1889, the renowned Edwin Hubble was often described as a tall, athletic, and elegant man who, by age 30, obtained an undergraduate degree in astronomy (eventually a PhD in astronomy), law, and mathematics. He also served as a major general in WWI and had experience as an attorney in Kentucky. As an active anti-fascist, Hubble enthusiastically re-joined the U.S. army forces again during World War II (in which he received a 1946 Medal of Merit for outstanding contribution to ballistics research), but eventually returned to his astronomical studies as a scientist on the homefront.
In 1919 he began his lifetime career at Mt. Wilson Observatory in California. He was researching fuzzy patches of light in the sky called “nebulae”. In 1924, he discovered a Cepheid, or variable star, in the Andromeda nebula. Thanks the work of Henrietta Leavitt, Hubble was able to calculate that this Cepheid was much farther away than anyone had thought, suggesting that the nebulae was not a simple gaseous cloud, (like what most astronomers believed) but in fact, a galaxy of stars just like the Milky Way. Until this discovery, people believed that magellanic clouds were the only things that existed outside of our galaxy. Thanks to this astronomer, we now know that the universe is much bigger than what we previously presumed.
Hubble made efforts to classify the galaxies according to their content, distance, shape, and brightness patterns, and his observations led to another momentous discovery: “By observing redshifts in the light wavelengths emitted by the galaxies, he saw that galaxies were moving away from each other at a rate constant to the distance between them (Hubble’s Law)” according to pbs.org. Basically, the increasing distance between galaxies had a direct relationship to how fast they were moving apart. This led to the calculation of the beginning of the expansion point and eventually led to the confirmation of the Big Bang Theory. Hubble’s calculations claim it to be about 2 billion years ago, however, more recent estimates would approximate it to about 20 billion years ago.
Currently located 326 miles above Earth’s surface, the Hubble Space Telescope at NASA orbits Earth. Named in Hubble’s honor, after three decades and more than 1.5 million observations since its initial launch in 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope continues to expand our understanding of the universe.
