biography
| name: |
Hubble, Edwin (Powell)
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1889–1953)
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| biography:
| Astronomer, born in Marshfield, Missouri, USA. A high school athlete in Wheaton, IL, he lettered in basketball and track at the University of Chicago. A Rhodes scholar at Oxford, he read law and boxed in an exhibition match against the French champion, George Carpentier. After one year of practising law in Louisville, KY (1913), he went back to the University of Chicago and took up astronomy. In 1917 George Ellery Hale, attracted by Hubble's observational skills, offered him a post at the Mt Wilson Observatory at Pasadena, CA, but with the American entry into World War 1 Hubble enlisted in the infantry. After serving as a ballistician in France, he joined Hale at Mt Wilson and began observing with the newly installed 100-in telescope (1919). By 1924 he had established that there are galaxies other than the Milky Way, and in 1929 was able to demonstrate that the galaxies were receding from ours, thus proving that the universe is still expanding. (The numerical relationship between a galaxy's distance and the speed of recession is known as Hubble's constant.) These and other of his findings had a major impact on the study of cosmology. By 1948 he shifted to the still larger (200-in) telescope on Mt Palomar, where he worked until his death. The Hubble Space Telescope, deployed in space in 1990, was named after him. |
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