Edwin Hubble was born in Missouri in 1889. His family moved to Chicago in 1898. In High School he was a good student, but not exceptional. He excelled in athletics and was on several school teams. While at the University of Chicago he won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford where he studied law. Upon returning to the U.S. he decided his future lay in astronomy.

In the early 1920s it was theorized that are galaxy the Milky Way was the entire universe. Hubble played a key role in establishing just what galaxies are. In 1924 Hubble measured the distance to the Andromeda nebula, a faint patch of light in the night sky, and showed it was about a hundred thousand times as far away as the nearest stars. It had to be a separate galaxy, comparable in size our own Milky Way but much further away.

Edwin Hubble was a man who changed our view of the Universe. In 1929 he showed that galaxies are moving away from us with a speed proportional to their distance. The explanation is simple, but revolutionary: the Universe is expanding. He was able to measure their retreating speed and distance by using a sensitive spectrograph which Hubble could use to determine the redshift of light (Doppler Effect) from distant galaxies. He discovered that a galaxy's redshift was proportional to it's distance.

Albert Einstein in 1915 proposed, in his the theory of gravity, that all the galaxies, and the whole Universe, had originated in a Big Bang, billions of years in the past. Edwin Hubble had helped support Einstein's theory.

Hubble used the 100 inch telescope on Mount Wilson in southern California to make his great discoveries. Named after Edwin Hubble the Hubble Space Telescope is in orbit around the Earth. Without an atmosphere or city lights to hinder it's view the Hubble Telescope is continuing the work of Edwin Hubble and expanding our knowledge of the Universe.