Biography On Edwin Hubble

Edwin Hubble

Edwin Powell Hubble was born in 1889 in Missouri, but moved to Illinois before his first birthday.  He then moved to Chicago with his family when he was nine years old, and he attended the University of Chicago when he came of age.  It was there that he earned his bachelor’s degree in mathematics, astronomy, and philosophy.  Then he went to go to Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship, and because of his father’s dying wish, he studied law, literature, and Spanish, while putting his science related studies on hold.  After completing his studies, Edwin went back to America in 1913, and spent a year teaching at a school in Indiana.  But, he then realized that he could no longer deny his proclivity to science, and he decided to enroll as a graduate student at the Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin.  His work somehow drew him back to the University of Chicago.  In 1917, he received a PhD, and his thesis was titled Photographic Investigations of Faint Nebulae, which eventually became the roots for the work that changed astronomy as we knew it.  Right after finishing his studies, he was offered a position at the Yerkes Observatory.  Instead, Hubble chose to fight in World War I, but got injured and ended up heading to the Mount Wilson Observatory.  There, he got access to both the 60-inch and 100-inch Hooker reflectors, with which he used in helping to invent the 200-inch Hale telescope.  Hubble proved to be one of the greatest astronomers of the twentieth century.  It is this man of many discoveries that the Hubble Space Telescope is named after.

Hubble used the 100-inch Hooker reflector and the most powerful telescope in the world to take extremely detailed measurements of several spiral nebulae.  He pointed out many Cepheid variables in the nebulae.  After going through a series of measurements, he concluded that the nebulae couldn’t all be within the Milky Way Galaxy, and that it must lie in other galaxies.    In this way, Hubble helped to measure the size of out galaxy.

Once conquering the problem of discovering the correct extent of the universe, he moved on to the problem of the redshift.  He measured the galaxies and showed that their light was shifted toward the red end of the spectrum.  Hubble came to a conclusion that the galaxies have to be receding from the earth at high velocities.  He created a law that states that the farther away a galaxy is from us, the more quickly it is going away from us. 

Despite all of his achievements and scientific breakthroughs, Edwin was never nominated for the Nobel Prize.  It wasn’t because nobody thought anything of his achievements, it was because astronomy wasn’t thought of as important at the time.  However, Hubble tried to get this to change, but he died in 1953, which was the year that astronomy was finally named as a branch of physics.  If these changes had been made while Hubble was still alive, he most likely would’ve been the one to receive the Nobel Prize. 

Edwin Hubble left a huge legacy in his telescope.  It is his name, and his name only, that embellishes the Hubble Space Telescope, which has gone through a decade of bringing back amazing images from space back to the earth.