Edwin Hubble :: essays research papers

Edwin Hubble was a man who changed our view of the Universe. In 1929 he showed that galaxies are moving away from us with a speed proportional to their quad. The translation is simple, but revolutionary the Universe is expanding. Hubble was born in Missouri in 1889. His family moved to Chicago in 1898, where at High School he was a promising, though not exceptional, pupil. He was more remarkable for his acrobatic ability, breaking the Illinois State high jump record. At university too he was an accomplished sportsman p beating for the University of Chicago basketball team. He won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford where he studied law. It was save some term after he returned to the US that he decided his future lay in astronomy. In the early 1920s Hubble played a discern role in establishing just what galaxies are. It was kn have got that some spiral nebulae (fuzzy clouds of barge on the night sky) contained individual stars, but there was no consensus as to whether these were re latively small collections of stars within our own beetleweed, the opaque 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 measured the distance to the Andromeda nebula, a faint patch of light with about the homogeneous apparent diameter as the moon, and showed it was about a hundred railway yard times as far away as the nearest stars. It had to be a separate galaxy, comparable in size our own Milky Way but much further away. Hubble was able to measure the distances to only a handful of other galaxies, but he realised that as a rough guide he could take their apparent inventiveness as an indication of their distance. The speed with which a galaxy was moving toward or away from us was relatively easy to measure due to the Doppler crusade of their light. Just as a sound of a racing rail railcar becomes lower as it speeds away from us, so the light from a gala xy becomes redder. Though our ears can hear the change of pitch of the racing car engine our eyes cannot detect the tiny red-shift of the light, but with a unsanded 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 instinct or outrageous good fortune, he correctly divined a straight tone fit between the data points showing the redshift was proportional to the distance.