Edwin Hubble :: essays research papers

Edwin Hubble was a man who changed our view of the Universe. In 1929 he showed that galaxies are lamentable away from us with a speed proportional to their distance. The explanation is simple, but revolutionary the Universe is expanding. Hubble was born in atomic number 42 in 1889. His family moved to Chicago in 1898, where at High nurture he was a promising, though not exceptional, pupil. He was more unprecedented for his athletic ability, breaking the Illinois State high jump record. At university similarly he was an accomplished sportsman playing for the University of Chicago basketball team. He won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford where he studied law. It was only roughly time after he returned to the US that he decided his forthcoming lay in astronomy. In the early 1920s Hubble played a key role in establishing just what galaxies are. It was kn proclaim that some curl nebulae (fuzzy clouds of light on the night sky) contained individual stars, but there was no consensus a s to whether these were relatively small collections of stars within our own galaxy, the Milky Way that stretches right across the sky, or whether these could be separate galaxies, or island universes, as big as our own galaxy but much further away. In 1924 Hubble calculated the distance to the Andromeda nebula, a faint patch of light with close the same unornamented diameter as the moon, and showed it was about a coke thousand times as far away as the warm stars. It had to be a separate galaxy, comparable in size our own Milky Way but much further away. Hubble was able to sum the distances to only a handful of other galaxies, but he earn that as a rough guide he could take their apparent brightness as an indication of their distance. The speed with which a galaxy was moving toward or away from us was relatively easy to measure delinquent to the Doppler shift of their light. Just as a sound of a move car becomes lower as it speeds away from us, so the light from a galaxy b ecomes redder. Though our ears can hear the change of pitch of the hotfoot car engine our eyes cannot detect the tiny red-shift of the light, but with a sensitive spectrograph Hubble could determine the redshift of light from distant galaxies. The observational data available to Hubble by 1929 was sketchy, but whether guided by inspired intellect or outrageous good fortune, he correctly divined a unbent line fit between the data points showing the redshift was proportional to the distance.