Physics: Edwin Hubble

Physics: Edwin Hubble
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Edwin Hubble (1889) Edwin Powell Hubble (November 20, 1889 – September 28, 1953) was an American astronomer.

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Edwin Hubble (1889) E dwin Powell Hubble (November 20, 1889 – September 28, 1953) was an American astronomer.

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Why is Edwin Hubble remembered? Ever y major advance in physics was made by a person working to understand something that didn't quite make sense yet. Edwin Hubble was one of those people.

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About Edwin Hubble Edwin Powell Hubble (November 20, 1889 – September 28, 1953) was an American astronomer. He played a crucial role in establishing the fields of extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology. Hubble proved that many obje cts previously thought to be clouds of dust and gas and classified as "nebulae" were actually galaxies beyond the Milky Way. 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 confirmed in 1929 that the recessional velocity of a galaxy increases with its distance from Earth, a behavior that became known as Hubble's law, although it had been proposed two years earlier by Georges Lemaître. The Hubble law implies that the universe is expanding. 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's name is most widely recognized for the Hubble Space Telescope, which was named in his honor, with a model prominently displayed in his hometown of Marshfield, Missouri.