Edwin Hubble

Hello! My name is Edwin Hubble, and I have always loved the stars. When I was a boy, I would look up at the sparkly night sky and wonder what was out there. For one of my birthdays, I even got my very own telescope. I spent hours pointing it at the moon and the bright dots of light, dreaming of all the secrets space was holding.

When I grew up, I became a special kind of scientist called an astronomer. I got to use a giant telescope on top of a tall mountain to peek deep into space. In the year 1924, I saw fuzzy, glowing clouds that other scientists had seen before, but I looked closer than anyone. I discovered something amazing. Those fuzzy clouds were not clouds at all—they were huge star cities, just like our own Milky Way. I called them galaxies. I also learned that all the galaxies are moving away from each other. Our whole universe is getting bigger and bigger.

I spent my whole life looking at the stars and learning about our amazing, big universe. I lived to be 63 years old. Today, other scientists still use my ideas to explore space. To honor my work, a very special and powerful telescope that flies in space was named after me—the Hubble Space Telescope. It takes beautiful pictures of faraway stars and galaxies so that kids just like you can keep wondering about the secrets of the sky.