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ASTRONOMER EDWIN HUBBLE

SIMO JELAČA, Ph.D.

Edwin Hubble is an American astronomer who founded extragalactic astronomy and cosmology. He is considered the leading cosmologist of the twentieth century. He was born in 1889 in Marshfield, Missouri, studied at Oxford University, and completed his doctoral dissertation at Yerkes Observatory. After getting his doctorate, he got a position at the Mount Wilson Palomar Observatory in Pasadena (Mount Wilson Palomar, Pasadena), where he spent his entire working life from 1916 to 1053.

While working at the observatory, he first investigated gaseous objects in space, called "nebulae", which are formed by stars that are extinguished. Those nebulae were located mainly outside the Milky Way galaxy and were spatially larger than the Milky Way galaxy itself. Many world astronomers spoke positively about the results of Edwin Hubble's work, for which the American Astronomical Association awarded him with its recognition.

Hubble determined that spiral galaxies rotate and that the stars in the galaxies move very quickly. He measured the distances of the stars from the Earth using Henrietta Leavitt's method, which is based on the shades of spectroscopic light colors, depending on the distance in space. Those measurements turned out to be remarkably accurate. Edwin Hubble also established that the entire universe is constantly expanding spatially at an accelerated rate, but that there is no center of expansion for these expansions. Due to the expansion of the universe, everything is becoming more distant from each other. When Albert Einstein, who until then did not know about the expansion of the universe, visited Edwin Hubble, Hubble convinced him of it, showing it to him on the telescope of the observatory where he worked. He explained to Einstein that these expansions take place due to the effect of solar gravity.

When Edwin was a child, during his early youth, he was very fond of his maternal grandparents, who often told him interesting historical family stories, which made Edwin fall in love with space stories and wanted it to be his profession, which it came true in his life. And when he became a famous astronomer, he traveled to Europe and gave lectures at the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, London, Paris, Switzerland and Italy.

By measuring the speed of movement of celestial objects in galaxies, he established a constant in his formula, which was named after him after his name "Hubble's constant". He found that when two galaxies are ten million light-years apart, their gravities become negligibly small.

Edwin Hubble died in 1953, and the first space telescope was launched into space in 1990, which was given his name "Hubble Telescope". That telescope has mirrors with a diameter of 240 cm. In 1993, with the help of a special shuttle, certain optical corrections were made to the lenses of the Hubble telescope. For years now, the Hubble telescope has been delivering extraordinary images of all kinds of cosmic objects, and it also regularly collects data on comet approaches to Earth and their collisions. Special attention is paid to events on Jupiter, as well as research on all planets where the necessary conditions for the origin of life can be observed.

During the Hubble telescope's operation in space, so far knowledge has reached a distance of about 12 billion light years and about 120 billion new galaxies have been discovered, which is difficult for an average educated person to understand. All the world's astronomers, with their work, did not even come close to achieving the results achieved by Edwin Hubble. Edwin Hubble is a man who managed to realize all his wishes in life, he became an eminent astronomer of his time and of the twentieth century.

Astronomy, after Hubble, was successfully continued by the English physicist Stephen Hawking, whom fellow astronomers called the "Second Einstein". Stephen Hawking was mainly engaged in the research of "Black holes" in space.

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