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 implication rewrote everything: the universe was expanding. He died September 28, 1953, and decades later they named a space telescope after him - the one that would see deeper into that expanding dark than he ever could.