Edwin Hubble – The Pioneer of Distant Stars

By Willa-e-Ali

Edwin Powell Hubble was born on November 20, 1889 in Missouri, US.
Hubble was an astronomer who played a crucial role in the field of
astronomy and is regarded as the leading cosmologist of the 20th Century.
He was the son of a businessman, named John Hubble who worked in the
insurance industry. While his mother, Virginia James was a homemaker.
He was a bright student and in 1906 won a scholarship to University of
Chicago, where he studied philosophy, mathematics, and astronomy.
There he served as a lab assistant for a year for Robert Millikan. Hubble
graduated in 1910. He went to the Oxford University in 1911 to study law
and Spanish. He had taken these subjects at the insistence of his father.
After getting his degree, he taught in a high school in Indiana, in 1913. After
the death of his father, he was free to pursue a scientific career. Therefore,
in 1913, he once again went to the University of Chicago, to graduate In
astronomy. In February 1924, he married Grace Burke Leib, and they had
no children.

Edwin Hubble was an astronomer.

Mount Wilson Observatory

He conducted his research at the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay,
Wisconsin, under the supervision of the astronomer Edwin Frost. It was
Hubble’s luck that he was completing his studies just as the director of
Mount Wilson, George Hale was hiring a new staff. He was offered a job,
and he accepted it, however, before he could take up the position, the US
started a war with Germany on 6th April, 1917. He delayed joining the
observatory to enlist in the US Army, however, Hale kept the position open
for him until the end of the war.

Hubble enlisted in the US Army

In 1919, he joined the astronomy establishment, and with the Hooker

telescope, he was able to look at the sky with more detail. He initially
studied the reflection nebulae within the Milky Way. Soon, he returned to
the problem of ‘spiral nebulae’ the same objects he had investigated for his
doctorate. The status of the spirals were then unclear, were they ‘distant
stars’ (currently known as galaxies), just clouds of gas or cluster of stars?
The answer to this was soon provided by Hubble.

In 1923, Hubble spotted a Cepheid Variable star in the Andromeda

Nebula.The fluctuations in the light of these stars allowed Hubble to
determine the nebula’s distance through the relation between the period of
Cepheid fluctuations and its luminosity. Hubble’s estimate laid the Nebula
approximately 900,000 lightyears away and placing it beyond the borders
of the Milky Way. Hubble’s ind convinced a great number of astronomers
that the universe contains countless galaxies. In 1924, Hubble through the
paper ‘Cepheid in Spiral Nebula’ proved that more galaxies existed.
 Cepheid Variable star.

Within a few years of this groundbreaking research, Hubble decided to go

on another adventure. He decided to find the answer to the question; `Why
did the vast majority seem to be moving away from the Earth?’ To tackle
this Hubble worked with another Mount Wilson astronomer, Milton
Humason. Humason measured the spectral shifts of the galaxies, while
Hubble worked on determining their distances. In 1929, he published his
first paper on the relationship between redshift and distance. He concluded
that they share a linear relationship; that is, if one galaxy is twice as far
away as another, its redshift is twice as large. After two years, Humason
and Hubble presented what astronomers and cosmologists deemed as
convincing evidence that the relationship between redshift and distance is
indeed, linear and that redshift is directly proportional to its distance.

Later Life
Hubble ran the Mount Wilson Observatory for the rest of his life. He
worked day and night to get astronomy recognized by the Nobel Prize
Committee. During World War II, he served in an administrative capacity at
the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland. He also worked on the Hale
telescope - a 200 inch reflecting telescope at the Palomar Observatory in
California, US, named after the astronomer and director of Mount Wilso
George Ellery Hale. In 1953, at the age of 70, Hubble died as a result of
cerebral thrombosis.