Edwin Powell Hubble

Edwin Hubble tied the nuptial knot with Grace Burke on February 26, 1924. The couple had no children.

Hubble suffered from a heart attack in July 1949 while on a vacation in Colorado. He recovered from the same. However, on September 28, 1953, a spontaneous blood clot in his brain led to cerebral thrombosis which cost him his life. He was 63 years old at the time.No funeral for him took place as his wife kept his burial site a secret.

To recognize and value the contributions he made to the field of astronomy, the United States Postal Service released a 41-cent stamp honoring Hubble on a sheet titled ‘American Scientists’ on March 6, 2008.

Edwin Hubble was born on November 20, 1889 in Marshfield, Missouri, to Virginia Lee Hubble and John Powell Hubble. His father was an insurance executive who moved with his family to Wheaton, Illinois, when young Edwin was 11 years of age.

As a young boy, Hubble showed his prowess in athletics. He excelled at all forms of sports, be it baseball, football, basketball or even track and field. He also won several medals and trophies for his athletic brilliance on field and court. Academically, he was an above average student.

Completing his high school studies, he enrolled at the University of Chicago to study law. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science in the subject in 1910. While at university, he was a member of the Kappa Sigma Fraternity.

After completing his graduation studies, Hubble spent three years at the Queen's College, Oxford, as one of the university's first Rhodes Scholars, initially studying jurisprudence and later adding literature and Spanish. He then earned his master’s degree. He also took a few courses in maths and science.

His father diedin 1913 and Hubble moved to Shelbyville where the rest of his family now lived, to care for his bereaved mother and siblings. The family yet again shifted to Louisville's Highlands’neighbourhood.

Edwin Hubble had an interest in astronomyfrom an early age but he adhered to his father’s insistence to study law. However he felt a lack of motivation to practice law and instead took up a teaching post in Spanish, physics, and mathematics at the New Albany High School.

His stint as a teacher at New Albany lasted for only a year, as he gave up all to start afresh. He pursued further education to become a professional astronomer. With the help of a former professor, he entered graduate schoolstudying astronomy at the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory. In 1917, he submitted his dissertation on‘Photographic Investigations of Faint Nebulae’, thus gaining his Ph.D.

With the US declaration of war on Germany in 1917,Hubble volunteered to serve in the United States Army. He was assigned to the newly created 86th Division, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. Post World War I, he spent a year in Cambridge, where he renewed his studies of Astronomy.

In 1919, Hubble accepted a staff position at the Carnegie Institution's Mount Wilson Observatory, near Pasadena, California. He retained this position until his death in 1953.

Edwin Hubble’s entry at Mount Wilson Observatory coincided with the completion of the world’s largest telescope, the Hooker Telescope. Using the newly constructed object, he set forth to make observations of the astronomic world.

Edwin Hubble achieved major success when he started working at the Mount Wilson Observatory. There he conducted his revolutionary research that helped prove the existence of galaxies other than our Milky Way galaxy.

His work also led to finding a constant relationship between the galaxies' redshifts and distance, which eventually helped to prove that the universe is vast and ever expanding. Additionally, he devised a classification system for galaxies that has been used by other researchers for decades and is popularly known as the Hubble sequence. It was for this that Hubble is till date regarded amongst the world’s most famous astronomers.