Edwin Hubble was an American astronomer who discovered that “nebulae” were actually galaxies and that the universe was much larger than previously believed. He also measured the distances and redshifts of galaxies, supporting the Big Bang theory. Hubble spent much of his career trying to get astronomy recognized as a category of physics. The Hubble Space Telescope is named after him.
Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) was a pioneering American astronomer responsible for several hugely important scientific advances in the early and mid-20th century. Hubble attended the University of Chicago and the University of Oxford, pursuing studies in mathematics, astronomy, philosophy and Spanish. At the time of his death in 1920, he was widely regarded as one of the greatest astronomers ever. The Hubble Space Telescope, the most productive space telescope in history, is named after him. Hubble’s Law, which states that the farther away a galaxy is, the greater its redshift, is taught in astronomy classrooms around the world.
Shortly after earning a PhD in 1917, Hubble went to work at the Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena, California, where he remained for the rest of his life. In 1919, just around the time of Hubble’s arrival, the 100-inch Hooker Telescope, then the largest in the world, was completed. At the time, it was believed that the Milky Way represented the entire universe and that faint objects like the Andromeda Galaxy were just nebulae similar in size to our solar system within the Galaxy.
Hubble’s great discovery, based on observations between 1922 and 1923 and announced on January 1, 1925, was that these “nebulae” were actually galaxies in their own right, extremely distant from the Milky Way. This was determined by locating variable stars within nebulae and using them to calculate distance. It turned out that the Andromeda Nebula was actually another galaxy located a couple of million light years away. This had been suspected for several years, in part because of observations of supernovae inside Andromeda, all characteristically fainter than supernovae previously observed in our galaxy. As a result of Hubble’s work, the astronomical community – and humanity as a whole – realized that the universe was much larger than previously believed.
Hubble’s second major “discovery” isn’t really his own, though it’s often misattributed to him. In 1929, together with Milton Humason, Hubble measured the distances and redshifts of 46 galaxies, establishing an empirical correlation between the distances of these objects and their redshifts. This was interpreted by cosmologists to mean that the universe was expanding outward in all directions, and that the redshift represented a Doppler shift whereby light from distant galaxies stretched out as the space between expanded. . The further apart the galaxies are, the faster they diverged and the redder the light was. This implied that at some point in the distant past, about 14 billion years ago, the universe began as a point of extreme density and temperature. This became known as the Big Bang theory and is accepted by the vast majority of physicists today. The Big Bang theory was first proposed by Alexander Friedmann in 1922, and observations by Hubble in the late 1920s provided the first observational support for the theory.
In the latter part of his career, Hubble has spent much time and effort trying to get astronomy recognized as a category of physics rather than a science in its own right. The main goal was to make astronomers eligible for the Nobel Prize in Physics. For a long time, this campaign was unsuccessful, but in the end the Nobel Prize Committee gave in and today a sufficiently important astronomical discovery is eligible for the Nobel Prize.
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