THE death of Edwin Hubble was mourned by his faithful cat Nicolas Copernicus. Had the real Nicolaus Copernicus still been alive, he would, no doubt, have mourned too. For Hubble's discovery that the Milky Way is but one galaxy among billions of others changed our picture of the Universe as profoundly as Copernicus's discovery that the Earth revolves around the Sun.
What brought about the change was a photographic plate, taken with the 100-inch Hooker telescope in California by Hubble on the night of 5 October 1923. On plate H335H, within an image of the great spiral nebula in Andromeda, was a single Cepheid variable star.
Astronomers prostrate themselves at the sight of Cepheids since Cepheids are distance indicators in a Universe distinctly lacking in cosmic milestones. And the distance that Hubble's Cepheid indicated for Andromeda was unbelievable— almost a million light years.
It meant that the Andromeda nebula was no nebula of glowing gas in the solar neighbourhood, as many had thought, but a galaxy of hundreds of billions of stars far beyond the limits of the Milky Way. And if Andromeda was a galaxy, all the other spiral nebulae, which crowded space out to the limits probed by the 100-inch telescope, must also be galaxies. Hubble had discovered the true size of the Universe. And it was unimaginably more vast than anyone had ever dreamt.
The story of Hubble's great breakthrough and what it led to—principally the confirmation of the big bang Universe—is told with great style by Gale Christianson in
Perhaps predictably, Hubble turns out to have been arrogant and egotistical, hogging the limelight while his colleagues fumed in the wings. Most surprising, however, were the lengths he would go to in order to promote himself. Not only did he elbow out colleagues so that he was always at Einstein's shoulder in photographs; he even engaged a publicity agent to trumpet his achievements on learning there was a chance he would be the first astronomer to win the Nobel Prize.
This was the ultimate irony of Hubble's life. Although the greatness of his discoveries was universally recognised, he was never sure enough of himself or his accomplishments to trust to the verdict of history.
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17:45 21 August 2008
11:17 21 August 2008
