Edwin Hubble

Born in 1889 in Missouri and raised partly in Illinois, Edwin Hubble first studied at the University of Chicago and then attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. After serving in World War I, he joined Mount Wilson Observatory in California, where the powerful telescopes there gave him the chance to tackle some of astronomy’s biggest questions.

In the 1920s, Hubble showed that several fuzzy "nebulae" were actually separate galaxies far outside the Milky Way. He also found a relationship between galaxies’ distances and their motion away from us, an observation that became a key piece of evidence that the universe is expanding. Those discoveries helped transform astronomy into a new picture of a vast, dynamic cosmos.

Hubble worked at Mount Wilson for the rest of his life and remained one of the most influential astronomers of the 20th century. He died in 1953, and his name later became famous around the world through the Hubble Space Telescope, a fitting tribute to a scientist who opened humanity’s view of the wider universe.