Edwin Hubble
Published on Nov 20, 2006 at 5:32 pm.
5 Comments.
Filed under astronomers.
One of the most recognized names in Twentieth Century astronomy is Edwin Hubble. Astronomers and astronomy students recognize the name, of course. Even many people from the public recognized the name. Now, anyone who is even a little aware of world events knows the name through the Hubble Space Telescope, which was named after Edwin Hubble.
I picked today to write about him, because Edwin Hubble was born November 20, 1889. As a boy in school, he made good grades, but he was most widely known by his peers and community for his athletic abilities, even setting a high jump record in high school for the state of Illinois in 1906.
In 1910, he received his BS degree from the University of Chicago. He was awarded a Rhodes Scholarship, and studied for three years at Oxford, where he studied law. Throughout his studies, he also studied his true passion: astronomy. But, upon returning to the United States, he began practicing law. He soon realized that he did not have much of a taste for law, and returned to the University of Chicago to pursue a PhD in astronomy. He was awarded his PhD in 1917, and was immediately offered a position at Yerkes Observatory. However, he turned down that appointment in order to enlist in the United States Army in order to serve his nation during the Great War (World War I). Though he enlisted as a private, within months he had been made made a captain. He was soon promoted to major and shipped to Europe. He served in combat, where he was injured (he never again would be able to completely straighten his right elbow).  When he returned to the United States, he was sent to the Presidio in California, where he received his discharge papers.Â
Upon leaving the Army, Hubble reported immediately to the Mount Wilson Observatory, still in uniform, to work for George Ellery Hale. On his way there, he stopped at Lick Observatory, where he was a commanding presense in uniform. From that day forward, astronomers at Lick always refered to Hubble as “the Major.” In fact, he seemed to always regard himself that way, often observing in coat and tie. Most of his career, though, was spent using the 100 inch Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson.  After the 200 inch Hale telescope was completed at Mount Palomar, Hubble was the first to get to use it. The first photograph that he took with the Hale telescope was of the variable nebula NGC 2261. This nebula had been a focus of his PhD dissertation, the first object that he had viewed at Lick Observatory, and the first thing that he photographed from the Mount Wilson observatory. On September 28, 1953, Hubble was walking home from his office when his wife Grace drove by on her way home from running errands. She stopped and picked him up, and then drove home.  She said that as she pulled into the driveway, he got a puzzled expression on his face, and began to breathe oddly.  She parked the car and then called for the maid to help her get her husband upstairs as he wasn’t feeling well. When she turned back to the car, he was slumped over, dead. He had died of a cerebral thrombosis. So ended the life of a great astronomer.
Edwin Hubble is most famous for his studies of the galaxies. He was the first to show that the spiral nebulae that astronomers were so puzzled about were in fact entire galaxies (or island universes, as he called them at first). This startling finding came through studies of M31, the Great Spiral Nebula of Andromeda 
(what we now call the Andromeda Galaxy). He showed that this body was well over two million lightyears distant, and larger than our own Milky Way. He then studied other “extragalactic nebulae” and developed a classification scheme still in use today based upon the morphology of the galaxies.Â
Even if these had been all the things that he’d done, Edwin Hubble would have earned a name for himself as a great astronomer. But, he did more. Edwin Hubble is perhaps best known for his work in 1929 showing that the farther away a galaxy is from us (except for the galaxies of the Local Group), the faster it is receding. Hubble was not the first to discover that these “extragalactic nebulae” were receding. That was done by Vesto Slipher of Lowell Observatory and James Keeler of Lick Observatory. But, Hubble combined his results with their results and produced a linear relationship between distance and recessional velocity that we know as the Hubble Law. This finding of an expanding universe could best be explained by understanding that the universe is expanding. This result had been predicted by Alexander Friedmann in 1922 by solving Einstein’s equations of general relativity.  But many cosmologists had resisted the notion of an expanding universe, because it implied that the universe must have had a beginning point, and idea strongly supported by Georges Lemaitre in a model for the origin of the universe that eventually became known as the Big Bang.  Einstein himself, assuming that the universe must be static and unchanging forever, had even gone so far as to put an extra term in his equations that would keep the universe from expanding. Hubble’s findings so shook Einstein that he made the journey all the way from Germany to California just to examine the data. It is this work that led NASA to choose to honor Edwin Hubble when it came time to name the Space Telescope.   Â
Interestingly, Hubble may have been in line for an Nobel Prize had he not died when he did.  Hubble had been part of a push for many years to get astronomy recognized internationally as a branch of physics rather than its own science. This makes sense, because astronomer take all the same courses as physicists. In fact, an astronomy degree is generally a physics degree with an astronomy emphasis. Most colleges and universities have physics and astronomy in the same department.  But, one of Hubble’s reasons for pushing to get astronomy as a branch of physics was that as a separate science, there was no Nobel Prize for available for astronomy. But, in 1953, shortly after Hubble’s death, astronomy was, in fact, declared a branch of physics, and several Nobel prizes since that time have been awarded to astronomers and cosmologists. The Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously, though, so Hubble was not eligible. Â
-Astroprof
(Images courtesy of Mount Wilson Observatory and NASA)Â Â Â
AndromedaM31 on April 30, 2007 at 8:29 am: 1
Astroprof,
Thank you for this wonderful website.
I enjoyed the write up on Edwin Hubble.
I am interested in the Andromeda Galaxy. I admire E. Hbble. I am new to astromony and wish to prusue it in College. Any good college’s you recommend either in the USA or UK. I have a Chemistry degree.
Thank you!
May His Force be with you,
Astroprof on April 30, 2007 at 2:57 pm: 2
When people ask me about \”good\” colleges, my first thoughts go to the big names: Arizona, Texas, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, Cambridge, etc. But, really, the best college is one that you fit in with. A small institution, with only one or two astronomers, if it is a comfortable fit, and if they treat their students well, is probably best for most people. You get the most attention and don\’t get lost in the crowd.
Bill on June 6, 2007 at 3:25 am: 3
Like most sources, you incorrectly credit Hubble with the “discovery” that the universe is expanding. In fact, Hubble correlated cosmic red shift with distance, not motion, and in several papers stated that his data best supported a non-expanding universe. The “apparent” Doppler shift, he wrote, was more likely the product of an “unknown principle.”
Astroprof on June 6, 2007 at 6:24 am: 4
The process of a “discovery” takes time. In fact, I didn’t actually credit Hubble with that discovery. Rather, I said that Slipher and Keeler discovered the distance-redshift relation, but Hubble was the one to quantify it. Hubble, like most others at first, didn’t appreciate what he had found. But, later he did come around to realizing that the distance-redshift relation was consistent with an expanding universe. But, he had to be convinced of the consequence of his own findings.
Wardell Lindsay on March 18, 2008 at 10:34 pm: 5
Hubble was right in assuming redshift was an “hitherto unknown principle of nature”. Newton and Einstein Law of Gravity left out the vector energy and missed that the Universe is in equilibrium with the centripetal force of gravity being balanced by the centrifugal force of moving masses: E=-mu/r + mcv
mg=mcDel.v = mcH=mcfcos(g) where H is Hubbles Constant. The red shift is cos(g)=v/c=z.
The Universe is in Equilibrium, with size R=158E24m, Mass=2.133E53kg, and Cycletime=16.5E9yrs. The density is 23E-27kg/m^3.
What is being called dark energy is the centrifugal energy mcv not included in Newton’s and Einstein’s Real energy Gravity Theories. Gravitational energy is a quaternion energy consisting of real energy -mu/r + vector energy mcv!
Conservation of energy gives equilibrium and g=cDel.v.