Edwin Hubble

Edwin Powell Hubble was born in Marshfield, Missouri, and grew up in Wheaton, Illinois, where he was a fine student and athlete. He studied mathematics and astronomy at the University of Chicago and then, as a Rhodes Scholar, law at Oxford. He briefly practiced law and taught high school before returning to astronomy. After serving in the army in the First World War, he joined the Mount Wilson Observatory in California, which had the largest telescope in the world. In 1923 and 1924 he found a type of variable star in the Andromeda nebula and used it to measure the distance, showing that Andromeda lay far outside the Milky Way. This proved that the universe contains many galaxies besides our own. He then sorted galaxies by their shapes. In 1929, using measurements by Vesto Slipher and his assistant Milton Humason, he showed that the farther away a galaxy is, the faster it is moving away from us, evidence that the universe is expanding. He served again in the Second World War, testing ballistics. He died in 1953. The Hubble Space Telescope is named for him.

Faith: Raised a Protestant Christian; some later statements suggest uncertainty. Source: Wikipedia