| Photo courtesy Observatories of the Carnegie Institution of Washington | |
| Edwin Powell Hubble | ||
| 20 November 1889 | 1938 Bruce Medalist | 28 September 1953 |
Upon graduation from the University of Chicago, Edwin Hubble won a Rhodes scholarship and earned a law degree at Oxford University. He taught high school for a year in Indiana and then returned to Chicago and astronomy. After obtaining his doctorate he spent his career, aside from army service in both world wars, at Mt. Wilson Observatory. In 1923 - 25 he identified Cepheid variables in “nebulae” NGC 6822, M31, and M33 and proved conclusively that they are outside the Galaxy, thus demonstrating that our Galaxy is not the Universe. His investigation of these and similar objects, which he called extragalactic nebulae and which astronomers today call galaxies, led to his now-standard classification system of elliptical, spiral, and irregular galaxies, and to proof that they are distributed uniformly out to great distances. (He had earlier classified galactic nebulae.) Hubble measured distances to galaxies and with Milton L. Humason extended Vesto M. Slipher’s measurements of their redshifts, and in 1929 Hubble published the velocity-distance relation which, taken as evidence of an expanding Universe, is the basis of modern cosmology.
Presentation of Bruce medal
Babcock, H.D., PASP 50, 87-96 (1938).
Other awards
Franklin Institute, Benjamin Franklin Medal, 1939.
Royal Astronomical Society, Gold medal, 1940, presented by H.C. Plummer, MNRAS 100, 342-50 (1940).
Some offices held
Astronomical Society of the Pacific, President, 1933.
Biographical materials
Christianson, Gale E., Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1995, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1996).
Christianson, Gale E., “Mastering the Universe ,” Astronomy 27, 2, 60 (1999).
Club Astronomique du Val de Loir [in French]
Glass, Ian, Revolutionaries of the Cosmos: The Astro-Physicists (Oxford Univ. Press, Oxford, UK, 2005).
Hubble Space Telescope Science Institute, Hubble Expands the Universe
Lemonick, Michael, Time Magazine
Mayall, N.U., Biographical Memoirs of the National Academy of Science 41, 175-214.
Osterbrock, Donald E., Ronald S. Brashear, & Joel A. Gwinn, “Self-made Cosmologist: the Education of Edwin Hubble,” in Edwin Hubble Centennial Symposium, Univ. of California, Berkeley 1989, ed. by Richard G. Kron (A.S.P. conference series v. 10), pp. 1- 18 [A brief version, without footnotes, appears in Mercury 19, 1, 2 (1990).]
Osterbrock,Donald E., Joel A. Gwinn, & Ronald S. Brashear, “Edwin Hubble and the Expanding Universe,” Scientific American 269, 1, 84-89 (1993).
Sandage, Allan, JRASC 83, 351-62 (1989).
Sharov, Alexander S. & Igor Dmitrievich Novikov, Edwin Hubble, the Discoverer of the Big Bang Universe (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 1993).
Wands, David, The MacTutor History of Mathematics archive
Whitrow, G.J., Dictionary of Scientific Biography 6, 528-33.
Hubble, Humason, and Hubble's Constant
Obituaries
Adams, W.S., Observatory 74, 32-35 (1954).
Humason, M.L., MNRAS 114, 291-95 (1954).
Robertson, H. P., PASP 66, 120-25 (1954).
More obituaries
Photos
American Institute of Physics
Caltech Archives [many, also at STScI site]
1914 New Albany High School yearbook—dedicated to Hubble, who taught Spanish and physics and coached basketball that year
Public Broadcasting System
University of California, San Diego [fishing]
University of St. Andrews
Named after him
Lunar crater Hubble
Minor Planet #2069 Hubble
Hubble Space Telescope
Hubble Law, Hubble Constant, Hubble Time, Hubble Flow, etc.
Hubble sequence of galaxy types [Hubble’s original paper]
Hubble’s Variable Nebula, NGC 2261
| Please send comments, additions, corrections, and questions to joe.tenn@sonoma.edu |
JST
2006-01-17 |