Edwin Hubble Research Paper

One of the earliest and most influential groups we studied were the Pythagoreans. Due to the fact, that their work was so fundamental to the development of modern science and of renowned Greek philosophy Plato, I though it important to consider them here. This is despite the fact that admittedly they weren’t “astronomers” and although Pythagoras was considered the “leader,” some even question whether or not he existed, and the story is really about his followers, who were a group. The Pythagoreans, were a kind of religious cult with a deep following in Italy. Although, they had this religious aspect, the attempted to address questions of fundamental importance to cosmology, including what is the meaning of the universe, what happens after death

Edwin Hubble was born in 1889, and is usually credited with the notion that our universe began with a Big Bang. As such, Hubble’s work dealt with questions of fundamental importance to cosmology, including how old is the universe, how did the universe begin, and what will be the ultimate fate of the universe. Before getting into Hubble’s discovery it is important to realize that the possibility for an expanding universe had been an ongoing discussion in the scientific community following Einstein’s theory of gravity. Einstein himself was troubled by this concept and dismayed when he found his calculations could not produce a truly static universe. This was because the accepted model of the time was an infinite, static universe. This model of course was backed by Newton. The logic of such an argument that no other model made sense because gravitational forces of any finite number of stars would cause them all to fall together into a compact blob. Under this paradigm the universe was infinitely old and would exist forever without changes to its structure. Einstein addressed the seeming flaw in his equations by adding what he called the cosmological constant to account for a static

Hubble found this relationship while working in Pasadena. His work essentially involved measuring the redshift of a number of distant galaxies. He was also able to measure their relative distance by measuring the apparent brightness of a class of variable stars in each galaxy. This relationship now called Hubble’s law states that the greater the distance to a galaxy the greater the redshift in an equation: V=H0d. Hubble constant is believed to be around 73.2 km/s/Mpc. This finding was exciting because Hubles law is directly proportional-so an object twice as far away is receding from us twice as fast. This is just what would be expected in an expanding universe, as an expanding universe would be expanding equally on all sides. Such a thought process can easily be visualized through the “expanding chocolate chip cake analogy” whereas the cake is being baked the chocolate chips in the cake recede from one another as the cake expands. This is of course just what the galaxies do as the universe expands. This discovery was incredible and was credited with solving Olber’s paradox of the dark night sky. It is also important to understand that the term red shift with respect to light implies that the object is moving away from the observer. This is because in a Doppler shift where light waves get “redshifted”