James Baquet

    If you had known American astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) as a young man, you might never have expected him to become at home in the farthest reaches of outer space.

    Born in Missouri, he moved to Illinois with his family as a preteen. He was a prize-winning member of his high school track team, and even in his years at the University of Chicago, he excelled more at sports — including basketball — than at the mathematics and astronomy he was studying. After attaining his bachelor’s degree in 1910, he went to Oxford as one of the first Rhodes Scholars (students who won an international award to study at Oxford), and took a master’s in law.

    When his father passed away in 1913, Hubble returned from England to care for his mother, two sisters, and younger brother, with help from another brother closer to his age. After a year of teaching high school science and math (and coaching basketball), he returned to university for his PhD.

    Joining the U.S. Army immediately after graduation, he stayed on in Cambridge after the war for further studies. In 1919, he was offered a job at Mount Wilson Observatory on a mountain above Los Angeles, California, where he worked until his death in 1953.

    Before Hubble, science believed that the Milky Way Galaxy (the one we live in) was the entire universe. Hubble was among those who proved that some nebulas (clusters of stars) were in fact other galaxies.

    His observations were also used to prove that other galaxies were moving away from ours, an idea now called the “Expanding Universe,” which is a fundamental part of the idea that the universe began with an event now called “The Big Bang.”

    Because astronomy was not considered a legitimate part of physics, Hubble was never considered for a Nobel Prize. But he campaigned to have this changed, and shortly after his death, astronomers became eligible for the Nobel Prize in Physics. Many believe that he would have received the prize had he not died before becoming eligible. In 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope was launched, named after Edwin Hubble.

    Vocabulary:

    Which word above means:

    1. having the right to do something, in this case win a prize

    2. group of things similar to each other

    3. system of stars and other materials held together by gravity

    4. proper, fulfilling all requirements

    5. child before the teen years, around 11 or 12 years old

    6. group of athletes who run and participate in field events (jumping, throwing things, etc.)