While fascinated by science and exploration, the young Edwin Hubble has been called a promising, though not exceptional, student. He was better known for his athletic abilities in those days. In high school in 1906 he won seven first places and a third place in a single high school track meet as well as setting a state record for high jump in Illinois. He continued his athletic pursuits at the University of Chicago playing basketball and boxing as he earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics and astronomy in 1910. However, it was his mind that made him a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford where he studied law.
In 1913, Edwin Hubble returned to the US and was admitted to the bar in Kentucky. He set up a small practice in Louisville and worked as a high school teacher and a basketball coach at New Albany High School in New Albany, IN. Whether he ever used his legal training is unclear. Perhaps his earlier reading of Jules Verne and H. Rider Haggard came back to him as he returned to the US as he decided that his future lay in astronomy. After a brief stint in the military during WWI (where he earned the rank of major), he returned to his studies at the Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago, and earned a PhD in 1917 with a dissertation entitled Photographic Investigations of Faint Nebulae.
He took a job at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California. Most astronomers of Hubble's day thought that all of the universe — the planets, the stars seen with the naked eye and with powerful telescopes, and fuzzy objects called nebulae — was contained within the Milky Way galaxy. Our galaxy, it was thought, was synonymous with the universe. Hubble played a key role in establishing just what galaxies are by showing that some spiral nebulae were actually entire galaxies—much like our own Milky Way.
In 1923 Hubble trained the Hooker telescope on a hazy patch of sky called the Andromeda Nebula. He found that it contained stars just like the ones in our galaxy, only dimmer. One star he saw was a Cepheid variable, a type small image of the Andromeda galaxyof star with a known, varying brightness that can be used to measure distances. From this Hubble deduced that the Andromeda Nebula was not a nearby star cluster but rather an entire other galaxy, now called the Andromeda galaxy.
In the following years he made similar discoveries with other nebulae. By the end of the 1920s, most astronomers were convinced that our Milky Way galaxy was but one of millions in the universe. This was a shift in thought as profound as understanding the world was round and that it revolved around the sun. This realization forever changed the way astronomers viewed our place in the universe.
However, perhaps Edwin Hubble's greatest discovery came in 1929. Resulting from his study of the spectra of 46 galaxies, and in particular of the Doppler velocities of those galaxies relative to our own Milky Way galaxy, Dr. Hubble determined that the farther a galaxy is from Earth, the faster it appears to move away. This the basis for Hubble's Law gave more support for the Big Bang Theory while supporting Albert Einstein's General Theory of Relativity.
First proposed by Albert Einstein in 1917, the General Theory of Relativity claimed that space was curved by gravity, therefore that it must be able to expand or contract. Einstein himself found this to be so far fetched that he later revised his theory to state that the universe was static and immobile. After Hubble's discoveries, Einstein was chagrined about changing his mind and said that second guessing his original findings was the biggest blunder of his life. In 1931, he visited Hubble at Mount Wilson to thank him.
After a long career entirely at Mt. Wilson Observatory, Edwin Hubble died of a cerebral thrombosis on September 28, 1953, in San Marino, California. He left behind his wife, Grace, but no children.
His legacy includes his discoveries and the telescope that bears his name, the Hubble Space Telescope.
