‘Scuze Me While I Kiss This Guy: Edwin Hubble
I find it amazing that just 100 years ago, we had no idea that there were other galaxies besides our own.
Around the year 1900 our view of the universe was very simple: our Milky Way galaxy had around 100 billion stars in it, some planets and some fuzzy cloud-looking thingys in it and… well… that’s it.
Beyond our galaxy, nothingness stretched out forever. The idea that there could be other galaxies like ours strewn about the universe wasn’t at all clear.
The discovery that there were other galaxies began with those fuzzy cloud-looking thingys that the largest telescopes of the day were starting to resolve. Around the turn of the last century, no one had any idea what they were.
Enter this guy named Edwin Hubble who, after getting his doctorate in Astronomy in 1917, and then fighting in World War I, looked through the 100-inch telescope on Mount Wilson for a closer look at those fuzzy patches.
One of them was the Andromeda Galaxy (called a nebula at the time). The large Mount Wilson telescope was able to resolve stars around the edges of the cloud and there were a lot of stars there. Among them, he found very special stars called Cepheid variables whose intrinsic brightness is based on the period with which it oscillates.
Measuring the period of those Cepheid variables from the Andromeda ‘nebula’, he noticed that these stars were very far away, so far away that they couldn’t be inside our galaxy.
The first galaxy outside of our own had been found.
From Sean Carroll:
Hubble established the first important fact about our universe, namely that it is big. In fact, we now know that in our observable universe, there are about 100 billion galaxies.
This happened less than one hundred years ago. That blows my mind, we’ve come so far in our understanding of the large scale structure of the universe in such a short time.
Hubble was also a remarkable figure in his own right. He became an astronomer after being an accomplished athlete, a Rhodes scholar, going to Oxford and becoming a lawyer. Eventually, he realized he wanted to be an astronomer.
Thank the Gods he didn’t stay in law.
Thank you Edwin Hubble. I love you man.
Andromeda Image Credit: Brian Jolley
Technorati Tags: cosmology, edwin hubble
Related Stories
POSTED IN: scuze me while I kiss this guy
1 opinion for ‘Scuze Me While I Kiss This Guy: Edwin Hubble
Ocean
Oct 19, 2007 at 6:48 am
I love this type of post. More, more!
Have an opinion? Leave a comment: