Who is Edwin P. Hubble and what has he to do with galaxies?
Edwin P. Hubble revolutionized cosmology by proving that the clouds of light astronomers saw in the night sky were actually other galaxies beyond our Milky Way. His greatest discovery was in 1929, when he identified the relationship between a galaxy’s distance and the speed with which it is moving. The farther a galaxy is from Earth, the faster it is moving away from us. This is known as Hubble’s Law. He also constructed a method of classifying the different shapes of galaxies. Edwin Powell Hubble was born in Marshfield, Missouri. In 1910, he received his undergraduate degree from the University of Chicago and studied law under a Rhodes Scholarship at Oxford University. His true love, however, was astronomy, and he returned to the University of Chicago to earn a Ph.D. in that subject and work at the Yerkes Observatory. He served in the infantry during World War I. He once said that he “chucked the law for astronomy,” knowing that even if he was second-rate or third-rate, it was astrono
