Hubble was a very unusual individual, and we can see that if we look at his early history before he became an astronomer. He was a very accomplished athlete. He was a boxer, he was a baseball player. He did all sorts of athletic pursuits, but he wanted to be the winner. He needed to be that person, because this work required such attention to detail, and he wanted to be at the highest level of accomplishment in this field. -
Narrator
In 1923, Hubble began the painstaking task of repeatedly photographing the Andromeda Nebula. Hooker might've been the biggest and best instrument at the time, but tracking tiny patches of the night sky with accuracy as the Earth turns is still a daunting challenge. Hubble had to actually be in the observatory at the telescope collecting the data, trying to gather information that had never been collected before, and there were so many different kinds of roadblocks he had to overcome in order to make this happen. Not only do you have to move the telescope itself, but you also have to move the dome so the slip lines up perfectly, and the whole building has to be in alignment with the telescope to work. And it wasn't simply pressing a button. This was a very manual operation. In some instances, an exposure might last several nights, which meant that you had to reposition the telescope to exactly the right place the next night that you wanted to take an exposure until you built up enough of an image on a plate to give you some data that you could then use. As an astronomer who's spent many a cold night at a telescope gathering data, I have a deep respect for his work. Each image he gathered was hard-won, because he had to constantly readjust the telescope to keep it accurately tracking. It took time after time after time of him photographing over and over and over again to get the right resolution, to get everything nice and stable, to deliver what he needed. With every image he gathered, the universe got bigger. (haunting music) In this drawer are the hundreds, the thousands of plates that Edwin P. Hubble worked so hard to collect. And getting that first plate, that was incredibly important, because he can reach deeper into the universe than anyone has ever reached before. Those results were absolutely astounding, the first proof that instead of seeing a nebula, it's really a galaxy, a collection of stars. That plate settled the debate. The Andromeda Nebula was made of stars. But this raised another question. Was it part of our galaxy? To find out, Hubble needed to find a variable star to apply Henrietta's measuring stick. So one image isn't going to do it for him, he has to take multiple images over and over and over again so that he can see the variability of that particular star and he can identify that one star out of all the other stars that are found in that galaxy. And here it is. This is the extraordinary plate in which Hubble captured that measuring stick he needed. In fact, up here in the top corner, you can see where he scribbled in red letters V-A-R, meaning variable. This was the plate that presented all the information he needed to understand the true nature of the universe. -
Narrator
Using Leavitt's law to calculate the distance, it was clear that Andromeda was very, very far away. What he was looking at was truly revolutionary. What was being seen were galaxies just like ours. Hubble didn't just find a bunch of new stars. He found an entire new galaxy. In seeing the Andromeda Galaxy for what it was, Hubble really changed how we perceive our place in the universe. -
Narrator
Not content with discovering that Andromeda is a distant galaxy, Hubble devoted the following years to photographing more and more galaxies through the giant telescope, and what he discovered was even more astounding. Every galaxy he examined appeared to be moving away from us at a tremendous speed, and the more distant the galaxy, the faster it was receding. Astronomers had always thought of the universe as static, but what Edwin Hubble revealed was that the universe is expanding. What's more, if we run the cosmic clock backwards, everything would have emerged from a single point of infinite density, marking the beginning of the universe. The big bang.
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