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The Archives, California Institute of Technology
Edwin Hubble
Edwin Hubble was an American astronomer who lived between 1889-1953. He studied law at Oxford under a Rhodes scholarship before deciding on a career as an astronomer. This career eventually led to cosmology. His studies were later interruped by service in both World Wars.
Hubble's extensive observations of galaxies helped him develop the idea of an expanding universe, which forms the basis of modern cosmology.
He also identified a relationship between a galaxy's speed and its distance, the ratio of which is called Hubble's constant. A project of the Hubble telescope, currently exploring outer space, is to accurately measure this constant.