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Biography Edwin Hubble was born to an insurance executive in Marshfield, Missouri and moved to Wheaton, Illinois in 1889. In his younger days, he was noted more for his athletic abilities rather than his intellectual genius, although he did earn good grades in every subject, except for spelling. He won seven first places and a third placing in a single high school meet in 1906. That year he also set a state record for high jump in Illinois. His studies at the University of Chicago concentrated on mathematics and astronomy which led to a BS degree in 1910. He spent the next three years as one of Oxford's first Rhodes Scholars, where he originally studied jurispudence (a form of law), before switching his major to Spanish and receiving the MA degree, after which he returned to the United States. Some of his British mannerisms and dress stayed with him all his life, occasionally irritating his more Americanized colleagues. Returning to the United States he worked as a high school teacher and a basketball coach at New Albany High School in New Albany, Indiana (a suburb of Louisville), and practiced law in Kentucky. He served in World War I and quickly became Major. He returned to astronomy at the Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago, where he earned a PhD in 1917 with a dissertation entitled "Photographic Investigations of Faint Nebulae". In 1919 Hubble was offered a staff position by George Ellery Hale, the founder and director of Carnegie Institution's Mount Wilson Observatory, near Pasadena, California, where he remained until his death. He also served in the US Army at the Aberdeen Proving Ground during World War II. For his work there he received the Legion of Merit. Shortly before his death, Palomar's 200-inch Hale Telescope was completed; Hubble was the first to use it. He died of a cerebral thrombosis on September 28, 1953, in San Marino, California. His wife, Grace, did not have a funeral for him and never revealed what was done with his body - it was apparently Hubble's wish to have no funeral service and be buried in an unmarked grave, or that he wanted to be cremated. As of 2006, the whereabouts of his remains are unknown. Galaxies exist beyond the Milky Way Hubble's arrival at Mount Wilson in 1919 coincided roughly with the completion of the 100-inch Hooker Telescope, then the world's largest telescope. Hubble's observations in 1923–1924 with the Hooker Telescope established beyond doubt that the fuzzy "nebulae" seen earlier with less sensitive telescopes were not part of our galaxy, as had been thought, but were galaxies themselves, outside the Milky Way. He announced this discovery on December 30, 1924. Hubble also devised a classification system for galaxies, grouping them according to their content, distance, shape, size and brightness. The universe is expanding
Other discoveries Hubble discovered the asteroid 1373 Cincinnati on August 30, 1935. He also wrote The Observational Approach to Cosmology and The Realm of the Nebulae around this time. Nobel Prize Hubble spent much of the later part of his career attempting to have astronomy considered an area of physics, instead of being its own science. He did this largely so that astronomers - including himself - could be recognized by the Nobel Prize Committee for their valuable contributions to astrophysics. This campaign was long unsuccessful and unfortunately Hubble's great achievements would remain unrewarded. The Nobel Prize Committee eventually decided that astronomical work would be eligible for the physics prize. Unfortunately for Hubble, this occurred in 1953 some months after Hubble's death. The Nobel Prize is never awarded posthumously. Honors Awards Footnotes Bibliography See also | ||||||||||||
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