Mathematician of the week:
Edwin Hubble: 1889 -1953
Hubble was born on the 20th
November 1889 In Missouri and apart from changing our view of the universe he
was actually rather good at sport! He held a state record for the high jump and
he also played basketball for the University of Chicago.
He went to Oxford to study law
and it was his return to America which heralded the start of his work into
astronomy. He helped determine what galaxies are during the 1920’s and he also
measured the distance to the Andromeda galaxy in 1924. This also helped to form
the conclusion that it was a similar size to our galaxy!
Hubble then began to measure the
distances to other galaxies and he realised that their apparent brightness was
an indication of their distance from us. Now another smart thing that Hubble
calculated was the speeds at which these galaxies were travelling at. He
performed this calculation by using the Doppler shift of the light emitted by
the galaxies. You can think of the Doppler shift as if you moved a sound source
away from you the sound becomes lower then as a light source moves away the
light becomes redder.
Hubble then found that the amount
of redshift was proportional to its distance. This means that galaxies are moving
away from us and each other as the universe expands! Brilliant! (this happened in 1929)
The Hubble telescope bears his
name in recognition of his fantastic work.
