Edwin Powell Hubble

Edwin Powell Hubble was an American astronomer born on November 20, 1889, in Marshfield, Missouri. His observations established that the universe extends far beyond the Milky Way and that distant galaxies are receding from one another, a relation now known as Hubble's law.

Hubble grew up in Wheaton, Illinois, and studied mathematics and astronomy at the University of Chicago, where he was also a heavyweight boxer. He went to The Queen's College, Oxford, as one of the first Rhodes Scholars, taking a degree in jurisprudence in 1912. After teaching briefly in Indiana and serving as an officer in the United States Army in France during World War I, he returned to Chicago for his doctorate and joined the Mount Wilson Observatory in California in 1919.

Using the 100-inch Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson, Hubble identified Cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda nebula in 1923 and 1924, demonstrating that it lay far outside our own galaxy. In 1929 he and his assistant Milton Humason published the relation between a galaxy's distance and its redshift that became Hubble's law, providing the first observational evidence for an expanding universe and a foundation for modern cosmology.

During World War II he supervised ballistics research at the Aberdeen Proving Ground and afterwards helped commission the 200-inch Hale telescope on Palomar Mountain. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences and received many international honours. He died of a cerebral thrombosis in San Marino, California, on September 28, 1953. The Hubble Space Telescope, launched in 1990, is named for him.

The name Edwin is from the Old English Eadwine, composed of ead meaning wealth or fortune and wine meaning friend, traditionally interpreted as rich friend. He carried this masculine name throughout his scientific career.