Label: Galaxies
September 28, 2010
In Honor of Edwin Hubble
Edwin Hubble, a great American astronomer, died 57 years ago today, September 28th in 1953. Hubble? Does his name ring a bell?
Well for one thing, the Hubble Space Telescope was named after him, though he had nothing to do with its planning or construction. This photograph of the gigantic Pinwheel galaxy was shot by the Hubble Telescope. Space Age scientists wanted to honor Hubble because he made some of the most important discoveries in modern day astronomy.
In the early decades of the Twentieth Century, Hubble was an astronomer at the Mt. Wilson observatory which had the largest telescope in the world at that time. 
Hubble discovered and proved that some of the dim, fuzzy patches of light photographed through the Mt. Wilson telescope were actually entire galaxies, similar to our own Milky Way Galaxy. The recognition that the Milky Way was only one of billions upon billions of galaxies in the universe forever changed the way astronomers think of space.
The other great discovery he made was based on the “redshift.”
No, it has nothing to do with football or politics. An astronomer’s “redshift” has to do with the color spectrum of distant galaxies. A spectrum of light is made up of the colors, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet. It seems that the more distant a galaxy is, the faster it seems to move and the more its color spectrum shifts toward the red. This is the basis of the Big Bang theory, which proposes that the universe began with an intense explosion of energy at a single moment in time (about 13 billion years ago) and has been expanding ever since.
Hubble would have been proud that the Space Telescope was named after him.
Posted by: Seymour Simon
