author
Edwin Hubble
1889–1953
A pioneering astronomer who helped show that the Milky Way is not the whole universe, he changed how people understood the scale of the cosmos. His observations also helped lay the groundwork for the idea that the universe is expanding.
2 Audiobooks
Extra-galactic nebulae
by Edwin Hubble
Photographic investigations of faint nebulae
by Edwin Hubble
About the author
Born in Missouri in 1889 and raised partly in Chicago, Edwin Hubble studied at the University of Chicago and later at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. After service in World War I, he joined Mount Wilson Observatory in California in 1919, where the world's most powerful telescopes gave him the chance to tackle some of astronomy's biggest questions.
At Mount Wilson, Hubble helped prove that objects once thought to be nebulae inside the Milky Way were actually separate galaxies far beyond it. He became one of the central figures in modern observational cosmology, and his work connecting galaxy distances with their redshifts became a key part of the evidence that the universe is expanding.
Hubble remained associated with Carnegie's observatories for the rest of his career and also contributed to plans for the 200-inch Hale Telescope at Palomar. He died in 1953, but his name remains widely known through the Hubble Space Telescope, a fitting tribute to a scientist who forever widened humanity's view of the universe.