BIRTH | Edwin Hubble, Queen's College, Oxford

Edwin Hubble, 1889-1953

November 20, 1889 – This day was born in 1889, 130 years ago, Edwin Powell Hubble, an American astronomer after whom was named the most powerful telescope ever before sent into space, the Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990.

A model of the telescope is is displayed in Hubble's home town of Marshfield, Missouri.

Hubble received a scholarship to  the University of Chicago in 1906 and worked as a lab assistant under Robert Millikan, who won a Nobel Prize later in 1923 for his work in physics.

Hubble won one of the first Rhodes Scholarships, in 1910. His ailing father, John Hubble, wanted Hubble to study law and he made this promise before leaving the United States. He dutifully studied at Queen's College, Oxford, earning an M.A. degree in jurisprudence and philosophy. 

However, while Hubble was at Oxford his father died. He returned to the United States to help his mother and his siblings. After serving in the military during World War I, rising to the rank of Lt.-Col., he returned to take up his long-suppressed love of astronomy, swiftly earning a Ph.D. in physics at the University of Chicago, where he was able to use an up-to-date telescope.

Hubble became one of the most important astronomers who ever lived. He discovered that many objects previously thought to be clouds of dust and gas and classified as nebulae were actually galaxies, beyond the Milky Way of our own galaxy.

He used the strong direct relationship between a classical Cepheid variable's luminosity and pulsation period, discovered in 1908 by Henrietta Swan Leavitt, to measure the distances of galaxies are from the earth. He provided evidence that a galaxy recedes faster, the farther it is from the Earth. This property is now known as Hubble's Law, though it had been discovered two years earlier by Georges Lemaître.

The Hubble-Lemaître law implies that the universe is expanding. A decade before, the American astronomer Vesto Slipher had provided the first evidence that light from many of these nebulae was strongly red-shifted, indicative of high recession velocities.

Hubble died September 28, 1953. He created the discipline of extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology,