Edwin Hubble | Notable Biographies

(20/11/1889 - 1953/09/28)

Edwin Powell Hubble
American astronomer

He was born on November 20, 1889 in Marshfield (Missouri).
Son of Virginia Lee James and John Powell Hubble, Executive of insurance, in Marshfield, Missouri.
In his youth, he noted more for their athletic skill that their intellectual abilities, despite getting good grades in all subjects, except in spelling.
He studied at the University of Chicago and the University of Oxford. He obtained Bachelor of law by the University of Chicago and starts to be interested in the mathematics and astronomy.
In 1913 he worked as Attorney in Kentucky, although soon leave the profession to devote himself to astronomy.
Between 1914 and 1917 he worked at Yerkes Observatory at the University of Chicago. More later in the Mount Wilson Observatory in 1919 where he became Director of research. He devoted himself to studying the nebulous and showed that in the majority of cases it is galaxies at enormous distances from our own, the Milky way. He oversaw the research conducted with 508 cm telescope at the Mount Palomar Observatory.
Qualified extragalactic systems. In 1923 he discovered a variable star of the type Cefeida in the Andromeda Nebula, and thanks to the Luminosidad-distancia relationship, it could demonstrate that Andromeda is not within our Galaxy, but outside of it, and that is a probably similar to the one in our Galaxy star system. In 1925, by measuring the shift to the Red of the distant galaxies gave account these away with speed increasing its distance is much greater. The relationship between the speed and distance that is the Galaxy, known as Hubble's law, and the ratio between the two figures is called Hubble constant.
He served in the United States Army in the field testing of Aberdeen during the second world war. For his work he received the Legion of Merit.
Although he was raised as a Christian, later became agnostic.
He suffered a heart attack in July 1949 while he was on vacation in Colorado. He died of cerebral thrombosis on September 28, 1953, in San Marino, California. It had no funeral and his wife Grace never revealed the location of his burial.