Edwin Power Hubble (photo ©Margaret Harwood, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segrè Visual Archives) was born on November 20, 1889, in Marshfield, Missouri, USA.
When he was a teenager, Edwin Hubble stood out for his athletic skills practicing many sports at school. Despite this, at school, he received good grades and at the University of Chicago, he earned a bachelor in science in 1910. However, subsequently, he switched to law due to a promise made to his father and at Queen’s College in Oxford he obtained a master’s degree. His father died in 1913 and young Edwin lost his motivation for studying law. Initially, he became a school teacher but decided to return to astronomy at the University of Chicago, where he obtained his Ph.D. in 1917.
In 2017 the USA entered World War I and Edwin Hubble joined the US Army. In 1918 he was sent to Europe but the division in which he served ended up not seeing combat. After the war ended, Hubble stayed in Europe for a year, in Cambridge, to study further astronomy.
Back in the USA, Edwin Hubble was offered a job at the Wilson Observatory, in California, by its founder and director George Ellery Hale. At that time the construction of the 100-inch Hooker Telescope was completed and it became the most powerful in the world. The observations made in the following years allowed him to find cepheid variable stars, which could be used to calculate the distances of the nebulae that host them and to prove that they were outside the Milky Way, contradicting the theory that was then more highly regarded.
Other studies by Edwin Hubble concerned galaxies’ redshift. The instruments of the time were limited but Hubble managed to arrive at the concept of an expanding universe, the first evidence of the Big Bang theory proposed for the first time by Georges Lemaître. However, at the time the estimates of the expansion rate of the universe, which was later called the Hubble Constant, were much higher than the later ones, indicating that the universe was born about two billion years ago.
For his discoveries, Edwin Hubble received a number of honors but at that time astronomy wasn’t considered related to physics and consequently studies in that field were not taken into consideration in the awarding of the Nobel Prize for physics. Hubble and other astronomers tried to change the situation but their success arrived only after his death and the Nobel can’t be assigned posthumously.
Edwin Hubble had the first serious health problems in 1949, with a heart attack. His wife Grace, who had married him in 1924, took care of him and Hubble changed his diet and working schedule to limit health risks. He died on September 28, 1953, following a cerebral thrombosis.
Several advances in astronomy arrived also thanks to Edwin Hubble’s studies. The most famous space telescope was named after him and that’s the most famous among the many tributes to this great astronomer.
