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Edwin Powell Hubble (November 20, 1889 – September 28, 1953) [1] was an American astronomer. He played a crucial role in establishing the fields of extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology .
The earliest and most direct observational evidence of the validity of the theory are the expansion of the universe according to Hubble's law (as indicated by the redshifts of galaxies), discovery and measurement of the cosmic microwave background and the relative abundances of light elements produced by Big Bang nucleosynthesis (BBN).
The law states that the greater the distance between any two galaxies, the greater their relative speed of separation. In 1929, Edwin Hubble discovered that most of the universe was expanding and moving away from everything else. If everything is moving away from everything else, then it should be thought that everything was once closer together.
The discovery of Hubble's law is attributed to work published by Edwin Hubble in 1929, [2] [3] [4] but the notion of the universe expanding at a calculable rate was first derived from general relativity equations in 1922 by Alexander Friedmann.
Distance measurements in astronomy have historically been and continue to be confounded by considerable measurement uncertainty. In particular, while stellar parallax can be used to measure the distance to nearby stars, the observational limits imposed by the difficulty in measuring the minuscule parallaxes associated with objects beyond our galaxy meant that astronomers had to look for ...
This correlation was first observed by Edwin Hubble and has come to be known as Hubble's law. Vesto Slipher was the first to discover galactic redshifts, in about 1912, while Hubble correlated Slipher's measurements with distances he measured by other means to formulate his Law. [64] Hubble's law follows in part from the Copernican principle. [64]
The physical universe is defined as all of space and time [a] (collectively referred to as spacetime) and their contents. [10] Such contents comprise all of energy in its various forms, including electromagnetic radiation and matter, and therefore planets, moons, stars, galaxies, and the contents of intergalactic space.
Physical cosmology, as it is now understood, began in 1915 with the development of Albert Einstein's general theory of relativity, followed by major observational discoveries in the 1920s: first, Edwin Hubble discovered that the universe contains a huge number of external galaxies beyond the Milky Way; then, work by Vesto Slipher and others ...