Edwin Hubble

Hello! My name is Edwin Hubble. When I was a boy, born on November 20th, 1889, I loved to read adventure stories about exploring faraway places. My favorite books were by an author named Jules Verne, who wrote about traveling to the Moon! Those stories made me look up at the night sky and wonder what was really out there beyond the stars we could see.

When I grew up, I decided to become an astronomer, which is a scientist who studies stars and planets. In 1919, I got a very exciting job at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California. I was able to use one of the biggest telescopes in the whole world, called the Hooker telescope. It was like having a giant eye to peek deep into space. Every night, I would look through it at fuzzy, glowing patches in the sky that everyone called 'nebulae.'

For a long time, scientists thought that everything in the universe was inside our own star-city, the Milky Way galaxy. But as I studied one of the biggest nebulae, called Andromeda, I made an amazing discovery in 1924. It was not a cloud inside our galaxy at all—it was another entire galaxy, filled with billions of its own stars, but very, very far away! This meant the universe was much bigger than anyone had ever imagined. I also discovered that all the galaxies were moving away from each other, which means the universe is getting bigger and bigger all the time!

I lived to be 63 years old, and I spent my life looking up at the sky and sharing what I found. My discoveries changed the way we see our place in the universe. To honor my work, scientists named a very powerful space telescope after me. It's called the Hubble Space Telescope, and it was sent into space in 1990. It floats above the Earth, taking incredible pictures of the distant galaxies that I was the first to show the world.