The American astronomer Edwin Hubble uncovered important evidence that the Universe is expanding.
He compared the measured relative velocities (red shifts) of faraway galaxies with his estimates of their distances from the Earth.
In 1929 he announced his discovery that the further away a galaxy is from another point in space, the faster it appears to recede as the Universe expands - Hubble's Law.
But there was more to be discovered about the expanding Universe - dark energy.
Image: Hubble measured the distances to galaxies such as Andromeda (NOAO/AURA/NSF/T.Rector & B.A.Wolpa)
Prof Brian Cox studies the colour of stars to understand how the Universe began.
Prof Brian Cox explains how we can understand the origins of the Universe through differing wavelengths of light emitted by stars.
This clip was filmed at a time when the Hubble Space Telescope had been discovered to have a flawed mirror, hence the reference to "failure". The Hubble Space Telescope went on to become one of the most successful NASA missions. This clip looks at some of the American astronomer Edwin Hubble's most important contributions to astronomy and the equipment he used at the Mount Wilson Observatory. The age of the Universe is now thought to be 13.7 billion years.
Edwin Hubble discovers galaxies outside the Milky Way and measures how far away they are.
Hubble's law is the name for the theory in physical cosmology (proven by observation) that: (1) all objects observed in deep space (intergalactic space) are found to have a Doppler shift observable relative velocity to Earth, and to each other; and (2) that this Doppler-shift-measured velocity, of various galaxies receding from the Earth, is proportional to their distance from the Earth and all other interstellar bodies. In effect, the space-time volume of the observable universe is expanding and Hubble's law is the direct physical observation of this process. It is considered the first observational basis for the expanding space paradigm and today serves as one of the pieces of evidence most often cited in support of the Big Bang model.
Although widely attributed to Edwin Hubble, the law was first derived from the General Relativity equations by Georges Lemaître in a 1927 article where he proposed that the Universe is expanding and suggested an estimated value of the rate of expansion, now called the Hubble constant. Two years later Edwin Hubble confirmed the existence of that law and determined a more accurate value for the constant that now bears his name. The recession velocity of the objects was inferred from their redshifts, many measured earlier by Vesto Slipher (1917) and related to velocity by him.
The law is often expressed by the equation v = H0D, with H0 the constant of proportionality (the Hubble constant) between the "proper distance" D to a galaxy (which can change over time, unlike the comoving distance) and its velocity v (i.e. the derivative of proper distance with respect to cosmological time coordinate; see Uses of the proper distance for some discussion of the subtleties of this definition of 'velocity'). The SI unit of H0 is s−1 but it is most frequently quoted in (km/s)/Mpc, thus giving the speed in km/s of a galaxy 1 megaparsec (3.09×1019 km) away. The reciprocal of H0 is the Hubble time.
As of 20 December 2012 the Hubble constant, as measured by NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) and reported in arxiv (http://arxiv.org/pdf/1212.5225.pdf), is 69.32 ± 0.80 (km/s)/Mpc (or 21.25 ± 0.25 (km/s)/Mega-lightyear)
As of 21 March 2013, the Hubble constant, as measured by the Planck Mission, is 67.80 ± 0.77 (km/s)/Mpc.
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