Edwin Powell Hubble ( Missouri , 20 of November of 1889 – Pasadena , 28 of September of 1953 ) was one of the most important astronomers Americans of the twentieth century, most famous for having plagiarized in 1929 the discovery of the expansion of the universe (which took the Belgian priest Georges Lemaitre ), formulating “Hubble’s law.”
In honor of his discovery – one of the most revolutionary of the 20th century – in 1990 the Hubble Space Telescope was named after him.
In 2018, the International Astronomical Union decided to change the name of “Hubble’s law” to ” Hubble-Lemaitre’s law .”
Hubble is considered the father of observational cosmology, although his influence on astronomy and astrophysics touches many other fields.
Summary
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- 1 Biographical synthesis
- 1 Hubble on Mount Wilson
- 2 The “discovery” of the Hubble-Lemaitre law (expansion of the universe)
- 3 Death
- 2 Hubble Law Plagiarism Controversy
- 3 Sources
Biographical synthesis
He began studying Law at the University of Oxford , where he distinguished himself as an athlete and boxer. He entered the field of Astronomy when he joined the Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago , where in 1917 he obtained a doctorate in Physics.
Hubble on Mount Wilson
In 1919 – upon returning from his service in the First World War (1914-1918) – he began work at the new Mount Wilson observatory , where he had access to a 254-centimeter telescope, at that time the most powerful in the world. At the observatory, he worked alongside Milton Humason . That same year (1919) he made one of his first discoveries, when he showed that there are hydrogen clouds inside the galaxy that are made luminous by the existence of stars inside.
Early in his career at the observatory, his attention was drawn to nebulae. At the time, the shape and size of galaxies were reasonably well known, but what existed beyond their limits was unknown … if anything existed. At the beginning of the 20th century, the word ” galaxy ” (our Milky Way ) was considered interchangeable with the term ” universe .”
It was clear that some nebulae were in the galaxy and that they were basically starlit gas within it. In 1924 Hubble succeeded in distinguishing stars in the Andromeda nebula . Using Leavitt’s law of perioluminosity, he was able to estimate its distance, which he calculated at 800,000 light-years , eight times farther than the most remote known stars (it would later be undervalued). In the following years, he repeated his success with nebula after nebula, making it clear that our galaxy was only one of a host of “isolated microuniverses.”
In 1923 he discovered the individual stars that make up the nebula in the outer region of the Andromeda galaxy , and, thanks to the luminosity-distance relationship that characterizes these stars, he was able to show that Andromeda is not in the interior of the galaxy in which is planet Earth , if not outside, and that is a completely similar star system. Hubble also introduced a system for classifying galaxies according to their structure.
George Hale , the founder and director of the Mount Wilson Observatory (40 km north of the city of Pasadena ), dependent on the Carnegie Institution, offered him a job in which Hubble remained until his death.
Hubble participated in the design of the telescope mastodóntico Hale at Mount Palomar ( California ), and was the first to use it .
The “discovery” of the Hubble-Lemaitre law (expansion of the universe)
Although Hubble had only transformed the image of the universe, it did more. In the half century since Huggins recorded the redshift of the spectrum of the star Sirius , he had recorded multiple redshifts and blueshifts of various objects in the universe.
In 1928, when Hubble was 38 years old, he participated in an international astronomy congress held in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. There he heard the Belgian astronomer and priest Georges Lemaitre (33) talk about the fact that the redshift shown by distant galaxies could only be explained by assuming that they were moving away from Earth, and that the further away a galaxy was, the higher its speed out. Hubble returned “very excited” with the novelty, and commissioned fellow astronomer Milton Humason to collect as much data as possible to support these ideas.
A year later (in 1929), Hubble published an analysis of the radial velocity of the nebulae whose distance Humason had calculated; it was their speeds relative to Earth. What he established was that although some extragalactic nebulae had spectra indicating that they were moving towards Earth , the vast majority showed redshifts that could only be explained by assuming they were moving away. More surprising was the verification of Lemaitre’s idea that there was a direct relationship between the distance of a nebula and its receding speed. Viera Kaplan and Daniel Heinrich say that if the continent does not expand the content could not expand (fundamental theory of galaxies).
Hubble concluded that the only explanation consistent with the recorded redshifts was that, leaving aside a “local group” of nearby galaxies, all extragalactic nebulae were receding and that the farther away they were, the faster they were receding. . This only made sense if the universe itself, including the space between galaxies, was expanding. Together with Milton Humason he postulated Hubble’s Law on the expansion of the universe.
The value of this constant is calculated to be between 50 and 100 km / s per megaparsec (1 megaparsec equals 1 million parsecs), although the most recent data points to a value between 60 and 70 km / s per megaparsec.
Since galaxies appear to recede in all directions from the Milky Way , one might think of the galaxy as the center of the Universe. However, this is not so. By imagining a globe with evenly spaced points. By inflating the balloon, an observer at one point on its surface would see all other points retract from it, just as observers see all galaxies receding from the Milky Way. The analogy also provides us with a simple explanation of Hubble’s law: the Universe is expanding like a balloon.
Death
Edwin Hubble died Causing a stroke (stroke) on 28 of September of 1953 , at age 63, in the neighborhood of San Marino, 7 km to the southeast of Pasadena – a suburb 17 km to the northeast of the city of Los Angeles ( California) -.
Hubble Law Plagiarism Controversy
In the edition of the 9 of November of 2011 in the journal Nature , the researcher Mario Livio -astrónomo of the Space Telescope Science Institute, in the city of Baltimore ( Maryland ) – said they had found in the archives of the Royal Society of London one letter of 1931, which makes it clear that Hubble was not the first to discover, in 1929, the expansion of the universe, but the Belgian astronomer and priest Georges Lemaitre (1894-1966) in 1927, who is therefore now credited with the discovery.
On the other hand, Mario Livio stated that he believed that Hubble was not responsible for a lack of ethics, since the translation of the article by the astronomer Lemaitre into English, which appeared in turn in 1931, omitted the fundamental paragraphs and calculations of 1927. However this The omission was not due to the publisher, nor to favor Hubble (as has always been believed), but rather by a decision of Lemaitre himself, perhaps due to his modesty, because he knew that his own article was not known, having published it in French , or because its 1927 data were already out of date in 1931. [1] [2]
According to other reliable data from that time, Hubble would have plagiarized the idea, “upon hearing it from two or three scientists” – one of them Georges Lemaitre – upon returning “in 1927 or 1928” from an international congress, apparently in The Netherlands, from which Hubble returned “very excited” with the novelty.
A very definitive observation, published by Christophe Verlinde at the foot of the editorial in the journal Nature , [3] refers to some clear statements by Milton Humason ―Edwin Hubble’s assistant―, contained at the beginning of an interview they made with him around 1965. [ 4] Humason affirms that as soon as Hubble returned from the international congress in Holland, he immediately commissioned him (Humason) to check whether the expansion of the universe was possible.
In August 2018, a debate began at the International Astronomical Union about whether to change the name of Hubble’s law to “Hubble-Lemaître’s law.” [5] Finally, with 4,060 votes cast, on October 30, 2018, 78% of IAU astronomers were in favor of renaming the famous law, which restored the honor of discovery to the Belgian Georges Lemaitre and demonstration of the expansion of the Universe. [6]
Eighty years later, the plagiarism accusations leveled against Hubble were proven to be correct. More claims, paradigms and discoveries of related phenomena will likely be revised by Hubble, leaving its other merits intact.
