New Universe Discovered by Edwin Hubble Celebrated by NASA

Published by Pratik Patil on

For humanity, the Sun is undeniably the most vital star, but the second most significant lies hidden within the Andromeda galaxy, a distant flicker 2.2 million light-years away. This star, named V1, is barely 1/100,000th as bright as the faintest star visible to the naked eye, yet its discovery by Edwin Hubble a century ago transformed our understanding of the universe. Using the 100-inch Hooker Telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory in 1923, Hubble identified V1 as a Cepheid variable star, a rare pulsating star type that serves as a cosmic measuring tool. This breakthrough revealed that the Andromeda “nebula” lay far beyond the Milky Way, shattering the long-held belief that our galaxy marked the edge of the universe.

This revelation fundamentally reshaped cosmology, proving that the Milky Way was just one of countless galaxies. Hubble’s findings upended astronomical paradigms and propelled humanity into an era of exploring the vastness of space. His realization, that the universe was far larger and more dynamic than imagined, came from tying galaxy distances to their redshifts—a phenomenon where light shifts to redder wavelengths as objects move away. This discovery, later formalized as Hubble–Lemaître’s Law, demonstrated that the universe was expanding, a concept further reinforced by the theoretical work of Georges Lemaître and observations by Vesto Slipher.

Hubble’s work not only redefined the universe’s scale but also paved the way for future innovations. Decades later, the Hubble Space Telescope, named in his honor, expanded his legacy by revealing the universe’s dazzling complexity—from star formation and colliding galaxies to black holes and dark energy. The telescope’s observations established the universe’s age at 13.8 billion years and confirmed the accelerating expansion driven by dark energy, a phenomenon Einstein once theorized but later abandoned.

Hubble’s journey began with a simple photographic plate of Andromeda and culminated in a legacy that continues to inspire exploration of the cosmos. By unveiling a universe teeming with mysteries, he forever changed humanity’s place in the cosmos, showing us that our existence is but a speck in an immense and ever-expanding reality.