From the Archive: Thanks to Edwin Hubble, we now can better comprehend the true scale of the universe.
The Andromeda nebula, photographed at the Yerkes Observatory around 1900. To modern eyes, this object is clearly a galaxy. At the time, though, it was described as "a mass of glowing gas," its true identity unknown. What’s in a date? Strictly speaking, New Year’s Day is just an arbitrary flip of the calendar, but it can also be a cathartic time of reflection and renewal. So it is with one of the most extraordinary dates in the history of science, January 1, 1925.
Hubble also benefited greatly from earlier research by Vesto M. Slipher of Lowell Observatory, one of the unsung heroes of modern cosmology. Slipher had found that many of the spiral nebulae were moving at enormous velocities, far faster than those of any known stars, and that the spirals were mostly traveling away from us. To Slipher, those peculiar velocities provided convincing evidence that they must be independent systems, driven by unknown mechanisms at work far outside our Milky Way.
Sensing the answer was at hand, Hubble stepped up his efforts. He spent long nights on his favorite bentwood chair, guiding the movements of the riveted-steel mount of the Hooker telescope to cancel out Earth’s rotation. The effort paid off with highly detailed, long-exposure images of the Andromeda nebula. The mottled light of the nebula began to resolve itself into a multitude of luminous points, looking not like a smear of gas but like a vast hive of stars.
Shapley needed to read no farther to understand the significance of Hubble’s words. “Here is the letter that destroyed my universe,” Shapley morosely told Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, then a doctoral candidate at Harvard, who was in his office when Hubble’s missive arrived. A single variable star, spotted by Edwin Hubble in the Andromeda nebula, completely changed our understanding of the scale of the cosmos. Discovery image at left; light curve of the star at right. inevitably leaked out to the media. As a result, the first public announcement of his astronomical breakthrough was a small story that ran inon November 23, 1924.
Oddly enough, it was Shapley, not Hubble, who suggested that astronomers should adapt their nomenclature to the new reality and call the external star systems “galaxies.” Hubble still carried within him the conservative views of the world he overthrew. He was also naturally inclined to disagree with any idea that came from his rival, Shapley.
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