![]() Hubble was able to measure the distances to only a handful of other galaxies, but he realised that as a rough guide he could take their apparent brightness as an indication of their distance. It had to be a separate galaxy, comparable in size our own Milky Way but much further away. In 1924 Hubble measured the distance to the Andromeda nebula, a faint patch of light with about the same apparent diameter as the moon, and showed it was about a hundred thousand times as far away as the nearest stars. It was known that some spiral nebulae (fuzzy clouds of light on the night sky ) contained individual stars, but there was no consensus as to whether these were relatively small collections of stars within our own galaxy, the ' Milky Way' that stretches right across the sky, or whether these could be separate galaxies, or 'island universes', as big as our own galaxy but much further away. In the early 1920s Hubble played a key role in establishing just what galaxies are. It was only some time after he returned to the US that he decided his future lay in astronomy. He won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford where he studied law. At university too he was an accomplished sportsman playing for the University of Chicago basketball team. He was more remarkable for his athletic ability, breaking the Illinois State high jump record. His family moved to Chicago in 1898, where at High School he was a promising, though not exceptional, pupil. The explanation is simple, but revolutionary: the Universe is expanding. In 1929 he showed that galaxies are moving away from us with a speed proportional to their distance. Biography Edwin Hubble was a man who changed our view of the Universe.
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