Edwin Hubble

Edwin Powell Hubble was born November 20, 1889, and became the astronomer who redrew cosmology's map. He took objects long dismissed as nebulae—dust and gas inside the Milky Way—and proved they were galaxies in their own right, using Henrietta Swan Leavitt's 1908 discovery about Cepheid variable stars to measure impossible distances. In 1929 he confirmed that a galaxy's speed away from Earth increases with its distance, the pattern now called Hubble's law, though Georges Lemaître had proposed it two years earlier and Vesto Slipher had seen the red-shift evidence a decade before. The implicatio…