Write your abstract here. The "Hubble Effect" - A Galaxy Insight
"Equipped with his five senses, man explores the
universe
around him
and calls the adventure Science. At the last dim horizon, we search
among ghostly errors of observations for landmarks that are scarcely
more substantial. The search will continue. The urge is older than
history. It is not satisfied and it will not be oppressed. The history
of astronomy is a history of receding horizons." Edwin Hubble -Astronomer: The
Hubble Space Telescope, which has so radically changed and
enlarged our picture and understanding of the cosmos and our place in
it, is a cooperative project of NASA and ESA (European Space Agency),
put into orbit in 1990 600 kilometers above the earth, allowing an
unrivaled, undisturbed view into deep space. During the past three years alone, the Hubble has delivered a goldmine of
discoveries: from the mapping of cosmic-web of dark matter, to rich
tapestries of evolving deep-space
galaxies, to the very dawn of galaxies
using mankind''s deepest optical view of
the
universe, to evidence for Dark Energy in the young universe from
Hubble Ultra Deep Field, to compelling evidence of monster
black holes at the centers of galaxies. Not by accident, the space-born telescope is named after one of the
most fascinating men in the history of science. Born in 1889, ten years
after Einstein (of whom he had little
knowledge), few greats have had more effect on our knowledge of the
cosmos than Edwin Hubble. A naturally-gifted track star, and scholar,
the Missouri-born Hubble spent his life following a doctorate in
astronomy from the University of Chicago answering two of the most
fundamental and profound questions about our universe: how big is it,
and how old ?When Hubble moved to California in 1919 to take up a position at
the Mount Wilson Observatory near Los Angles, little was know about the
size and age of the universe. The number of known galaxies at the time
he first looked out to the cosmos from Mt Wilson was exactly one: the
Milky Way. The Milky Way was thought to embrace the entire cosmos with
everything else, distant puffs of celestial gas. Hubble''s great breakthrough came in 1923 when with a fresh eye he
showed that a distant cloud of that peripheral celestial gas in the
Andromeda Constellation known as M31 wasn''t a gas cloud, but a maze of
brilliant stars, a "nebulae" (Latin for "cloud") -a galaxy a 100,000
light years across and at least 900,000 light years distant from Earth. This discovery led to his 1924 research paper "Cephids in Spiral
Nebulae" (Hubble''s term for galaxy) showing that the universe -which we
now know houses some 130 billion galaxies- was made up of not just the
Milky Way, but a myriad of "island universes," many far more distant
and larger. Hubble then turned to the next question of equally cosmic
proportions,just how big is the universe, and made an equally striking
discovery: that all the galaxies except for our local cluster are
moving away from us at a speed and distance that are nearly
proportional. In short, the more distant the galaxy, the faster it was
moving. The concept of an expanding universe destroyed the old, longstanding
notion of a static steady-state universe, the wonder of which Stephen Hawking has
exclaimed, was that it wasn''t obvious before that a static universe
would have collapsed in upon itself. Hubble''s ignorance of Einstein''s General Theory of Relativity led to
his nor being able to connect the dots between a universe that was
expanding evenly in all directions (the "Hubble Constant") to a
geometrical starting point, a "primeval atom, a Big Bang. That answer
came several decades later with the discovery of cosmic background
radiation from a hissing, constant, uniform low-frequency radio signal at a Bell Labs facility in rural New Jersey. Galaxy News Reported September 5th,