Hubble Telescope

Artist: Ginny Blankenship

Sponsor: Jerry and Mary Lou Hubble

Dedicated to: Dr. Edwin P. Hubble

(This is a portrait of the Nebulae “Mystic Mountain”)

In 1924 the astronomer Edwin Hubble announced his discovery of the first galaxy outside

our Milky Way. Hubble had studied law at Oxford, following his dying father’s wishes, but returned to the United States in 1913 with no real drive to continue in the legal profession. He went to graduate school to study astronomy instead, and finished his doctoral dissertation just

before he enlisted to serve in the First World War. His dissertation was on nebulae: cloud-like formations in space. After the war, George Hale invited Hubble to join the staff of the Mount Wilson observatory in California; there he would work with their new 100-inch Hooker telescope, the largest telescope in the world at the time. Hubble agreed to come to Mount Wilson to continue his work on nebulae.

Hubble was studying the Andromeda and Triangulum nebulae, which he thought at first were

star clusters in our galaxy, the Milky Way. At the time, most astronomers believed that the

Milky Way galaxy was the only galaxy in the universe. As Hubble looked closely at Andromeda, he discovered that one of it’s stars was a kind of star that was very bright and pulsed at regular intervals. Cepheid variables can serve as a “yardstick” to mathematically calculate distances in the universe. Hubble calculated the Cepheid to be almost a million light years away, which would place it well outside the farthest stars in the Milky Way. He peculated that Andromeda was not a nebulae at all, but another entire galaxy separate from our own. Further discoveries of dozens of additional Cepheids reinforced his findings that ours was just one of many galaxies in the universe.

Edwin was only 35 when he made the discovery that expanded the known boundaries of the universe. He opened the door for the discovery of many galaxies outside our own - and discovered 23 of them himself. He was also the first to suggest that the universe is expanding. His peers scoffed at the idea, but Stephan Hawking has since called it, “one of the greatest intellectual revolutions of the 20th century.”

In 1990, a new telescope was launched; built to orbit the earth and take photographs and measurements deep into the reaches of the universe, it was called the Hubble Telescope. Edwin was born 20 Nov. 1889 in Marshfield, MO: (on Route 66) died 28 Sept. in San Marino, CA. at age 63.