BIRTH | 130 years ago, Edwin Hubble

Edwin Hubble

This day was born in 1889, 130 years ago, Edwin Powell Hubble, an American astronomer after whom was named the most powerful telescope hitherto sent into space, the Hubble Space Telescope. A model is displayed in his home town of Marshfield, Missouri.

Hubble received a scholarship to  the University of Chicago in 1906 and worked as a lab assistant under Robert Millikan, who won a Nobel Prize later for his work in physics. 

In his senior year at Chicago, Hubble was voted a Rhodes Scholarship, one of the first,  So after graduation in 1910, he enrolled at Queen's College, Oxford, where for three years he studied law and philosophy. He earned a bachelor's degree in jurisprudence. Sadly, about that time, his father, John Hubble, died.

Edwin Hubble helped establish the field of extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology and is one of the most important astronomers ever. Hubble discovered that many objects previously thought to be clouds of dust and gas and classified as "nebulae" were actually galaxies of their own, beyond the Milky Way of our galaxy. He used the strong direct relationship between a classical Cepheid variable's luminosity and pulsation period, discovered in 1908 by Henrietta Swan Leavitt, for scaling galactic and extragalactic distances.

Hubble provided evidence that the recessional velocity of a galaxy increases with its distance from the Earth, a property called Hubble's Law, though it had been formulated and demonstrated two years earlier by a Jesuit priest, Georges Lemaître, at the University of Louvain. The Hubble–Lemaître law implies that the universe is expanding from a "Big Bang". A decade before, the American astronomer Vesto Slipher had provided the first evidence that the light from many of these nebulae was strongly red-shifted, indicative of high recession velocities. Hubble died September 28, 1953.