Edwin Hubble. Biography of a scientist

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Hubble Edwin Powell. Biography of a scientist

Biographies of great scientists

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Edwin Hubble (1889-1953).

Hubble has become a true classic of twentieth century science. The scientist left a grandiose legacy - the evolving world of galaxies, governed by the law of his name. He made such outstanding discoveries that they give an indisputable right to call Hubble the greatest astronomer since the time of Copernicus.

Hubble's ancestors, natives of England, appeared on the American continent as early as the 17th century. Edwin Powell Hubble was born on November 20, 1889, in the small town of Marshfield, Missouri, to John Powell Hubble, an insurance agent, and his wife, Virginia Lee James. He spent his childhood in a strong friendly family, where eight children grew up. Edwin became interested in astronomy early, probably under the influence of his maternal grandfather, who built himself a small telescope.

Edwin graduated from high school in 1906. Studying was easy for him, he did not bother himself with studies and did not particularly stand out among his peers. At the age of sixteen, Hubble entered the University of Chicago, which was then one of the top ten best educational institutions in the United States. The astronomer F. R. Multon, the author of the well-known theory of the origin of the solar system, worked there. He had a great influence on the further choice of Hubble.

There is little information about Edwin's student life. Usually they only remember that he was fond of sports, played basketball, boxed, and the coaches even predicted a career for him as a professional boxer.

After graduating from university, Hubble managed to get a Rhodes scholarship and go to England for three years to continue his education. However, instead of the natural sciences, he had to study law at Cambridge. Here, at the Queen's College, among the children of the English elite, all the traits of Hubble's character were formed - restraint, self-esteem, humanitarian interests, a love of the book, a gift for clearly and convincingly expressing one's thoughts. In the summer of 1913, Edwin returned to his homeland, but he did not become a lawyer. Hubble strove for science and returned to the University of Chicago, where at the Yerkes Observatory, under the guidance of Professor Frost, he prepared a dissertation for a Ph.D. His work was a statistical study of faint spiral nebulae in several parts of the sky and was not particularly original. But even then, Hubble shared the opinion that "spirals are star systems at distances often measured in millions of light years."

At this time, a great event was about to take place in astronomy: the Mount Wilson Observatory, headed by the remarkable organizer of science D. E. Hale, was preparing to commission the largest telescope, a hundred-inch reflector (250 cm. - Note aut). Among others, Hubble received an invitation to work at the observatory. However, in the spring of 1917, when he was completing his dissertation, the United States entered the First World War. The young scientist declined the invitation, volunteered for the army, received a military education and was appointed commander of an infantry battalion of the Black Hawk Division. As part of the American Expeditionary Force, Major Hubble ended up in Europe in the fall of 1918, shortly before the end of the war, and did not have time to take part in the hostilities. In the summer of 1919, Hubble demobilized and hurried to Pasadena to accept Hale's invitation.

At the observatory, Hubble began to study nebulae, focusing first on objects visible in the Milky Way band. These were the objects of our Galaxy - diffuse and planetary nebulae. Hubble showed that stars are the source of the glow of nebulae. He also came up with the conclusion that planetary nebulae glow due to the re-emission of ultraviolet radiation from central stars into the optical range. The problem of the glow of galactic nebulae has been largely solved.

And then a boundless field of study of nebulae visible outside the Milky Way opened up. The first thing Hubble did was to classify them. All such nebulae, which, as it turned out, were other galaxies, were divided by Hubble into spiral, elliptical, and irregular. The former, often fuzzy and complex classifications have been replaced by a coherent scheme. "I used it for 30 years," the famous astronomer Walter Baade later wrote, "and although I stubbornly searched for objects that could not really fit into the Hubble system, their number turned out to be so insignificant that I can count them on the fingers."

The Hubble classification continues to serve science, and all subsequent modifications of its essence have not been affected. In the anthology "Book of Primary Sources on Astronomy and Astrophysics, 1900-1975" by K. Lang and O. Gingerich (USA), which reproduced the most outstanding research for three quarters of our century, three Hubble works are placed, and the first of them is a work on the classification of extragalactic nebulae. The other two relate to the establishment of the nature of these nebulae and the discovery of the law of redshift.

The classification, of course, did not solve the question of the nature of nebulae. Since their discovery, the most opposite ideas have coexisted or changed. In nebulae, especially spiral ones, they have seen both nearby objects, in which stars and planets supposedly arise from diffuse matter, and distant star systems - galaxies. Decisive would be to determine the distances to them.

In 1923, Hubble began observing the Andromeda nebula with 4 and 6822 inch reflectors. On the very first successful record on October XNUMX, compared with others, he discovered a weak variable in addition to two new stars. It turned out to be a Cepheid, a representative of a remarkable class of stars whose period of brightness fluctuation is closely related to their luminosity. According to the dependence "period - luminosity", established by the Cepheids of the Galaxy, it was possible to estimate the luminosity of the discovered star, and then the visible brightness immediately indicated its distance and, thus, the distance to the Andromeda Nebula. The scientist concluded that the large Andromeda Nebula is indeed another star system. Hubble obtained the same results for the NGC XNUMX nebula and the Triangulum nebula.

Although a number of astronomers soon became aware of Hubble's discovery, the official announcement was made only on January 1, 1925, when G. Ressel read Hubble's report at the congress of the American Astronomical Society. The famous astronomer D. Stebbins wrote that the Hubble report "expanded the volume of the material world a hundredfold and definitely resolved the long dispute about the nature of spirals, proving that these are gigantic collections of stars, almost comparable in size to our own Galaxy." Now the Universe appeared before astronomers as a space filled with star islands - galaxies.

The delay in reporting such an important result for more than a year was due to the contradiction that Hubble's discovery entered into with A. van Maanen's then seemingly convincing, but in fact erroneous conclusion about the rapid rotation of a number of spiral galaxies.

Already one establishment of the true nature of the nebulae determined the place of Hubble in the history of astronomy. But an even more outstanding achievement fell to his lot - the discovery of the law of redshift.

In mid-January 1929, in Proceedings of the US National Academy of Sciences, Hubble presented a short note entitled "On the relationship between distance and radial velocity of extragalactic nebulae." A simple comparison of the velocities of the nebulae with their distances undoubtedly indicated that the desired connection exists and the K-term introduced into the kinematic equations must be proportional to the distance. According to Hubble, the coefficient in the K-term was about 500 km/s per megaparsec (later it turned out that the obtained value was overestimated by about an order of magnitude). This meant that the galaxies were flying apart from each other and their speeds increased linearly with distance. Soon this dependence was called the Hubble law, and the coefficient of proportionality - the Hubble constant, and in his honor began to be denoted by the Latin letter H0.

The Mount Wilson Observatory began to determine the radial velocities of ever more distant galaxies. By 1936, M. Humason published data for one hundred nebulae. A record speed of 42 km / s was recorded from a member of a distant cluster of galaxies in Ursa Major. But this was already the limit of the 000-inch telescope. More powerful tools were needed.

In 1935, Hubble and the theoretical physicist R. Tolman made an attempt to consider the nature of the redshift, based on the calculations of galaxies. The redshift attenuates the light of galaxies, and some corrections must be introduced into their measured magnitudes. Depending on the cause of the redshift, such corrections will be different, and hence the results of calculations of galaxies depending on the stellar magnitude will also turn out to be different. However, the researchers failed to obtain a definite result. "A final conclusion," Hubble pointed out, "based on observational criteria, is not possible until results are obtained with a 200-inch reflector."

Hubble's law was almost immediately recognized in science. The importance of Hubble's discovery was highly appreciated by Einstein. In January 1931, he wrote "New observations of Hubble and Humason regarding redshift ... make it plausible that the general structure of the universe is not stationary."

Hubble becomes one of the most famous astronomers in the world. He is invited to give lectures at the universities of America and England, awarded honorary medals, elected members of academies and scientific societies. At Yale University, he gave a course of lectures on galaxies, later published in the form of the book "The World of Nebulae", a summary of the knowledge he received on the largest instrument of that time. High recognition of merit did not change Hubble's life. He still worked hard and, as before, eschewed organizational and all kinds of representative activities. But it would be wrong to represent him as a hermit, he has many interesting friends and good acquaintances. Among them are composer Igor Stravinsky, writer Aldous Huxley, artist and director Walt Disney, American and English writers and actors. He was deeply interested in the philosophy and history of science, collected the rarest books of the XNUMXth-XNUMXth centuries on astronomy, and was closely associated with the famous Huntington Library in San Marino.

There is evidence that Hubble was fairly conservative on policy issues. But this did not prevent him from taking a clear civic position in the Second World War unleashed by Nazi Germany. In October 1940, Hubble made the first public call for immediate British assistance, and in November 1941, six weeks before the Pearl Harbor tragedy, Hubble addressed American veterans, making his position even clearer: "I'm not telling you what we need fight on the side of England or Russia. I tell you this is our war... If the American Expeditionary Force is needed to crush Nazism, they must be sent abroad. We don't have to choose - it's a dire necessity."

Immediately after the United States declared war on Japan, retired Major Hubble, now in his fifties, made an unsuccessful attempt to enlist in the army. But only in August 1942, he managed to get involved in defense work at the Aberdeen Proving Ground (East Coast of America). The center of the test site was a ballistic laboratory, which was headed by Hubble. The work of the Hubble division turned out to be, in particular, connected with the shuttle operations of the American bomber aircraft in 1944. “The real feat,” Hubble recalled after the war, “was to create bombing tables for Russian bombs, without having any data other than a qualitative description. These tables were used on our bombers when they lay down on the return course after landing on Russian territory.”

Hubble honestly fulfilled his duty and could be satisfied with the high appreciation of his work, he was awarded in 1946 the Medal of Merit, specially established for civilians for outstanding contributions to military operations. Fermi, Oppenheimer and other physicists - the creators of atomic weapons - received the same award that year.

Hubble returned to peaceful work with the firm conviction that there should be no more wars. “War with the use of new types of weapons,” he said of atomic bombs and rockets, “will turn civilization into ruins. Now our world has become so small, all its corners have become so achievable that no people can maintain their security alone. Even if it is against our will, in order to survive, we are forced to cooperate with each other. War or self-destruction - these concepts we must consider synonymous. "

After the war, the observatory, where Hubble returned, resumed work on the creation of a two-hundred-inch (508-centimeter) telescope. Hubble chaired the committee for the development of advanced plans for research on the new instrument, was a member of the management committee of the combined Mount Wilson and Mount Palomar observatories. Hubble saw the main task of the observatory in solving the cosmological problem. "We can confidently predict," he said with conviction, "that the 200-incher will tell us whether the redshift should be considered evidence in favor of a rapidly expanding universe, or whether it is due to some new principle of nature."

Hubble had no doubt that it was he who had to do the main work in this direction on the new instrument. However, his colleagues believed that the calculations of faint galaxies conceived by Hubble were not an effective enough means of solving a problem whose general significance no one questioned. It was necessary to strengthen the entire base on which extragalactic research was built, first of all, to carry out photoelectric measurements of faint stars as photometric standards, to look for Cepheids and other indicators of distances in distant galaxies, to solve other equally important problems, and only then take on a new definition of the Hubble constant. In essence, Hubble was removed from active work on the 1949-inch reflector, which finally became operational in XNUMX. But still, it was he who received the first pictures on the new instrument.

In the summer of 1949, Hubble suffered a severe heart attack. Having hardly coped with the illness, he returned to work again - he searched for variables and new stars in galaxies, discovered supernovae. But his activity has noticeably dropped, and there have been few publications over the years. Hubble's last major work was, together with the young scientist Sandage, a study of high-luminosity variable stars in the Andromeda and Triangulum nebulae. These massive young stars are interesting not only from the point of view of stellar evolution, but also as possible indicators of distances to those distant galaxies where Cepheids can no longer be observed.

In May 1953, Hubble visited England, where at a meeting of the Royal Astronomical Society he gave a lecture on the law of redshift, talked about the prospects for research in cosmology. Apparently, he felt quite healthy, and nothing foreshadowed the imminent end.

Hubble passed away from a stroke on September 28, 1953, quite unexpectedly, when at lunchtime, together with his wife, he drove from the observatory in a car to his house.

There are no monuments to Hubble on Earth. No one even knows where he is buried, such was the will of his wife. A crater on the Moon and asteroid No. 2069 are named after him. In honor of one of the outstanding astronomers of the 1990th century, Edwin Hubble, in XNUMX the most powerful telescope launched into space orbit was named and significantly expanded the capabilities of astronomers.

Author: Samin D.K.

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