Edwin Hubble

Edwin Hubble (born November 20, 1889, Marshfield, Missouri, U.S.—died September 28, 1953, San Marino, California) was an American astronomer who played a crucial role in establishing the field of extragalactic astronomy and is generally regarded as the leading observational cosmologist of the 20th century.

Hubble was the son of John Powell Hubble, a businessman who worked in the insurance industry. His mother, the former Virginia Lee James, was a homemaker who ran the household alone during John’s frequent absences on business. The Hubbles had eight children.

In 1906 Hubble won a scholarship to the University of Chicago, where he served for a year as a student laboratory assistant for physicist Robert Millikan, a future Nobel Prize winner. Hubble graduated in 1910 and was selected as a Rhodes Scholar from Illinois. He spent three years at the University of Oxford and was awarded a B.A. in jurisprudence, a subject he had taken at the insistence of his father. After his father’s death in 1913, the way was open for him to pursue a scientific career.

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Upon his return to the United States later in 1913, Hubble taught high school in Indiana for a year. He then entered the University of Chicago and embarked on graduate studies in astronomy. Hubble conducted his observational research at the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, under the supervision of astronomer Edwin Frost. By this time Yerkes was no longer on the cutting edge of astronomy, but Hubble did have access to a quite powerful telescope, an innovative 24-inch (61-cm) reflector.

It was Hubble’s great good fortune that he was completing his graduate studies just as the director of the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, George Ellery Hale, was scouting for new staff. The observatory’s 100-inch (254-cm) Hooker telescope, the most powerful in the world, was nearing completion. Hubble accepted Hale’s job offer, but, before he could take up the position, the United States declared war on Germany on April 6, 1917. He hastily completed his dissertation on “Photographic Investigations of Faint Nebulae” in the spring of 1917 so that he could enlist in the U.S. Army. Hale, however, held the Mount Wilson position open for him until the end of the war. Hubble served in France, rising to the rank of major, but it is unlikely that he saw action.

At Mount Wilson, Hubble initially studied reflection nebulae within the Milky Way. However, soon he returned to the problem of the so-called spiral nebulae, objects he had investigated for his doctorate. The status of the spirals (as they were widely known) was then unclear. Were they distant star systems (galaxies in current terminology) comparable to the Milky Way Galaxy, or were they clouds of gas or sparse star clusters within, or close by, the Milky Way? The theory that there are visible galaxies had fallen from favour in the second half of the 19th century but was revived early in the 20th century. At the start of the 1920s, astronomers generally reckoned that no clinching evidence was at hand to settle the debate. Such evidence, however, was soon to be provided by Hubble.

In 1923 Hubble found Cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda Nebula, a very well-known spiral. The fluctuations in light of these stars enabled Hubble to determine the nebula’s distance using the relationship between the period of the Cepheid fluctuations and its luminosity. Although there was no clear consensus on the size of the Milky Way, Hubble’s distance estimate placed the Andromeda Nebula approximately 900,000 light-years away. If Hubble was right, the Nebula clearly lay far beyond the borders of the Milky Way Galaxy (the largest estimates of its size put its diameter at around 300,000 light years). The Andromeda Nebula therefore had to be a galaxy and not a nebulous cloud or sparse star cluster within the Milky Way. Hubble’s finds in the Andromeda Nebula and in other relatively nearby spiral nebulae swiftly convinced the great majority of astronomers that the universe in fact contains a myriad of galaxies. (The current distance estimate of the Andromeda Nebula—now known as the Andromeda Galaxy—is 2.48 million light-years. An improved Cepheid period-luminosity relationship accounts for much of the difference between the current estimate and Hubble’s.)

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Within a few years of this pathbreaking research, Hubble decided to tackle one of the outstanding puzzles about the external galaxies (or extragalactic nebulae, as Hubble always called them): Why did the vast majority seem to be moving away from Earth (if the redshifts in their spectra are interpreted as the result of Doppler shifts)? To this end, Hubble was aided by another Mount Wilson astronomer, Milton Humason. Humason measured the spectral shifts of the galaxies (and in so doing built on the pioneering studies of the Lowell Observatory astronomer Vesto Melvin Slipher), and Hubble focused on determining their distances. In 1929 Hubble published his first paper on the relationship between redshift and distance. He tentatively concluded that there is a linear redshift-distance relationship; that is, if one galaxy is twice as far away as another, its redshift is twice as large. Two years later Hubble and Humason presented what astronomers and cosmologists widely judged to be very convincing evidence that the relationship is indeed linear and hence that a galaxy’s redshift is directly proportional to its distance.

Starting with Albert Einstein’s 1917 paper “Kosmologische Betrachtungen zur Allgemeinen Relativitätstheorien” (“Cosmological Considerations on the General Theory of Relativity”), a number of physicists, mathematicians, and astronomers had applied general relativity to the large-scale properties of the universe. The redshift-distance relation established by Hubble and Humason was quickly meshed by various theoreticians with the general relativity-based theory of an expanding universe. The result was that by the mid-1930s the redshift-distance relationship was generally interpreted as a velocity-distance relationship such that the spectral shifts of the galaxies were a consequence of their motions. But Hubble throughout his career resisted the definite identification of the redshifts as velocity shifts. Hubble hoped to shed light on this issue by investigating the numbers of extragalactic nebulae that lay at various distances in space. Hubble conducted these studies in part with the distinguished mathematical physicist and chemist Richard C. Tolman. Writing in the mid-1930s, however, Hubble and Tolman stressed the uncertainty of the observational data. They declined to choose publicly and unambiguously between a static and a non-static model of the universe. (Hubble later argued that the evidence seemed to favour the concept of a stationary universe, but he did not definitely rule out an expanding universe.)

Hubble published little original research after 1936—the year he published his important book The Realm of the Nebulae, which explained his approaches to extragalactic astronomy and his view of the subject’s history. By then he had certainly done much to lay down the methods and techniques that extragalactic astronomers would follow or have to take into account for decades, particularly at Mount Wilson and at the Palomar Observatory, home of the great 200-inch (508-cm) reflecting Hale Telescope that made its first observations in 1949. Hubble was therefore the central figure in the establishment of extragalactic astronomy in the 1920s and ’30s.

Hubble continued at Mount Wilson, though during World War II he served in an administrative capacity at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland. He died as the result of a cerebral thrombosis in 1953 and was survived by his wife, Grace. The couple had no children.