Edwin Hubble by Luke M.

Have you ever wondered who discovered galaxies? Who discovered that the universe is expanding? Who discovered that some nebulae weren’t actually nebulae? Edwin Hubble was the one the world can thank for these discoveries.

Early Life
Edwin Hubble was born on November 20, 1889, in Marshfield Missouri. When he was 12, their family moved to Chicago, where he lived a long part of his life. When he was a kid, his grandfather made him a telescope, which may have sparked his life in astronomy. Hubble was the 3rd child of the family. He had 6 siblings of 2 boys and 4 girls. There was a total of 3 boys and 4 girls. In school he was a good student, but he liked the outdoors more. When he was young, he and a friend watched a lunar eclipse. This also probably helped him be the man he was known for. Hubble went to Central school for elementary. His teachers thought he was smart, but also a show-off and a smart aleck. He earned a scholarship to UC, or the University of Chicago.

Young Adult Life
In UC, Hubble studied both law and astronomy. His father wanted him to be a lawyer, but Hubble wanted to be an astronomer. During the summers of college, he worked at a railroad. The railroad taught him surveying, and that was one of the things needed to become an astronomer.  Hubble also at some point joined a fraternity. They were called Kappa Sigma and they chose top athletes. Hubble was tall and athletic, and won first place in lots of track meets. He coached an undefeated basketball team later in his life, too. He won a junior college scholarship in physics. On his last year at UC he was voted the Rhodes scholar of 1910. He then went to England for 3 years at Oxford University. There he went to Queens college. At Queens, he continued taking what he needed to be an astronomer and a lawyer. Hubble was offered a job at Dr. Millikan’s laboratory. There, he worked on the largest refracting telescope in the world.

Work at Mt. Willson
When he got back from England in 1914, he was offered a job at the Mt. Wilson observatory. He said to save a spot for him because he would fight in World War 1. After the war, he came back and took his rightful spot at Mt. Wilson. One night in the 1920’s, Hubble was looking through the 100 inch Hooker telescope and he noticed that the stars in the Andrenoma nebula were much dimmer than those of the ones in the Milky Way. From this he found out that the Andrenoma Nebula was actually a galaxy, seperate from the Milky Way. This was similar with other nebulae. By the end of the 1920’s, millions of galaxies were thought to exist. But Hubble made a strange discovery in the early 30’s: all the galaxies were moving away from each other. The farther the galaxies were, the faster they moved away from each other. He used the Hooker telescope to find this out.  The main mirror of the telescope had the glass part alone weighing 5 tons. It was a 101 inch long by 13 inch thick circle of glass. Hubble died of heart attack on Sept 28, 1953 in San Marino, California.

Do you ever look out at the stars and wonder how we know so much about them? The Hubble space telescope helped a lot in our knowledge of the stars. It was named after Edwin Hubble because he was a great astronomer who made us more than one step closer to fully and completely understanding the universe.