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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 .
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 ...
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.
This episode explores the theories of the big crunch, the big rip and the big freeze, that are postulated by physicists as possible fates for the universe. [3] Al-Khalili indicates that the difficulty in understanding this is our limited ability to comprehend something of such immensity both physically and philosophically. [ 4 ]
The publication of the observations by Slipher, Wirtz, Hubble and their colleagues and the acceptance by the theorists of their theoretical implications in light of Einstein's General theory of relativity is considered the beginning of the modern science of cosmology.
This concept, initially known as the "Primeval Atom" by Lemaitre, was later elaborated into the modern Big Bang theory. If the universe had expanded at a constant rate in the past, the age of the universe now (i.e. the time since the Big Bang) is simply proportional to the inverse of the Hubble constant, often known as the Hubble time.