Which astronomer is credited with discovering that the Universe is expanding?
"The Beginning and End of the Universe The Beginning and End of the Universe is a two-part British television series outlining the theory of the beginning of the universe and the theories about its ending. This episode, exploring theories of how the universe came into being, outlines the realisation of Edwin Hubble that the universe is expanding, and the discovery of the residual radiation that gave weight to the Big Bang theory. It also highlights some lesser known theorists including Georges Lemaître, who first theorised that there was a big bang, Ralph Alpher, who stated that the light from this"
"in the universe expanding or contracting. In 1929, Edwin Hubble found evidence for the idea that the universe is expanding. This resulted in Einstein dropping the cosmological constant, referring to it as ""the biggest blunder in my career"". At the time, it was an ad hoc hypothesis to add in the cosmological constant, as it was only intended to justify one result (a static universe). Progress in solving the field equations and understanding the solutions has been ongoing. The solution for a spherically symmetric charged object was discovered by Reissner and later rediscovered by Nordström, and is called the Reissner–Nordström"
"Georges Lemaître Georges Henri Joseph Édouard Lemaître, RAS Associate (; 17 July 1894 – 20 June 1966) was a Belgian Roman Catholic priest, astronomer, and professor of physics at the Catholic University of Leuven. He proposed on theoretical grounds that the universe is expanding, which was observationally confirmed soon afterwards by Edwin Hubble. He was the first to derive what is now known as Hubble's law, or the Hubble-Lemaître law, and made the first estimation of what is now called the Hubble constant, which he published in 1927, two years before Hubble's article. Lemaître also proposed what became known as"
"of the world's most highly cited scientists. Idit Zehavi Idit Zehavi () (born 1969) is an Israeli astrophysicist and researcher who discovered an anomaly in the mapping of the cosmos, which offered insight into how the universe is expanding. She is part of the team completing the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and is one of the world's most highly cited scientists according to the list published annually by Thomson Reuters. Idit Zehavi was born in Israel in 1969 and completed her education in Jerusalem, earning a PhD from the Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in"
"majority of cosmologists, astrophysicists and astronomers, as the observational evidence points to a hot Big Bang cosmology with a finite age of the universe, which the steady state model does not predict. In the 13th century, Siger of Brabant authored the thesis ""The Eternity of the World"", which argued that there was no first man, and no first specimen of any particular: the physical universe is thus without any first beginning, and therefore eternal. Siger's views were condemned by the Pope in 1277. Cosmological expansion was originally discovered through observations by Edwin Hubble. Theoretical calculations also showed that the static"
"Einstein brushed him off with """" (“Your math is correct, but your physics is abominable”). In 1929, Edwin Hubble (1889–1953) announced his discovery of the expanding universe. The current generally accepted cosmological model, the Lambda-CDM model, has a positive cosmological constant and thus not only an expanding universe but an accelerating expanding universe. If the universe were expanding, then it must have been much smaller and therefore hotter and denser in the past. George Gamow (1904–1968) hypothesized that the abundance of the elements in the Periodic Table of the Elements, might be accounted for by nuclear reactions in a hot"
"Alexander Friedmann Alexander Alexandrovich Friedmann (also spelled Friedman or Fridman ; ) (June 16 [O.S. 4], 1888 – September 16, 1925) was a Russian and Soviet physicist and mathematician. He is best known for his pioneering theory that the universe was expanding, governed by a set of equations he developed now known as the Friedmann equations. Alexander Friedmann was born to the composer and ballet dancer Alexander Friedmann (who was a son of a baptized Jewish cantonist) and the pianist Ludmila Ignatievna Voyachek. Friedmann was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church as an infant, and lived much of his life"
"David Layzer David Raymond Layzer (born December 31, 1925) is an American astrophysicist, cosmologist, and the Donald H. Menzel Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at Harvard University. He is known for his cosmological theory of the expansion of the universe, which postulates that its order and information are increasing despite the second law of thermodynamics. He is also known for being one of the most notable researchers who advocated for a Cold Big Bang theory. When he proposed this theory in 1966, he suggested it would solve Olbers' paradox, which holds that the night sky on Earth should be much brighter"
"The mathematician and physicist Alexander Friedmann pioneered the theory that universe was expanding governed by a set of equations he developed now known as the Friedmann equations. Arno Allan Penzias, the physicist and radio astronomer co-discoverer of the cosmic microwave background radiation, which helped establish the Big Bang theory, the scientists Robert Herman and Ralph Alpher had also worked on that field. In quantum mechanics Jewish role was significant as well and many of most influential figures and pioneers of the theory were Jewish: Niels Bohr and his work on the atom structure, Max Born (Schrödinger equation), Wolfgang Pauli, Richard"
"Idit Zehavi Idit Zehavi () (born 1969) is an Israeli astrophysicist and researcher who discovered an anomaly in the mapping of the cosmos, which offered insight into how the universe is expanding. She is part of the team completing the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and is one of the world's most highly cited scientists according to the list published annually by Thomson Reuters. Idit Zehavi was born in Israel in 1969 and completed her education in Jerusalem, earning a PhD from the Racah Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1998. That same year, while researching the"
"Accelerating expansion of the universe The accelerating expansion of the universe is the observation that the expansion of the universe is such that the velocity at which a distant galaxy is receding from the observer is continuously increasing with time. The accelerated expansion was discovered in 1998, by two independent projects, the Supernova Cosmology Project and the High-Z Supernova Search Team, which both used distant type Ia supernovae to measure the acceleration. The idea was that as type 1a supernovae have almost the same intrinsic brightness (a standard candle), and since objects that are further away appear dimmer, we can"
"that the recessional velocity of a galaxy increases with its distance from the earth, a property now known as ""Hubble's law"", despite the fact that it had been both proposed and demonstrated observationally two years earlier by Georges Lemaître. Hubble's Law implies that the universe is expanding. A decade before, the American astronomer Vesto Slipher had provided the first evidence that the light from many of these nebulae was strongly red-shifted, indicative of high recession velocities. Hubble's name is most widely recognized for the Hubble Space Telescope which was named in his honor, with a model prominently displayed in his"
"the meeting is to promote contacts between scientists working in the field of Relativity, Gravitation and Cosmology and related fields. The First Alexander Friedmann International Seminar on Gravitation and Cosmology devoted to the centenary of his birth took place in 1988. Alexander Friedmann Alexander Alexandrovich Friedmann (also spelled Friedman or Fridman ; ) (June 16 [O.S. 4], 1888 – September 16, 1925) was a Russian and Soviet physicist and mathematician. He is best known for his pioneering theory that the universe was expanding, governed by a set of equations he developed now known as the Friedmann equations. Alexander Friedmann was"
"represented the entire Universe or was merely one of numerous galaxies in the Universe. In 1929, Hubble and Milton L. Humason formulated what is now known as Hubble's Law by combining Cepheid distances to several galaxies with Vesto Slipher's measurements of the speed at which those galaxies recede from us. They discovered that the Universe is expanding (see the expansion of the Universe). However, the expansion of the Universe was posited several years before by Georges Lemaître. In the mid 20th century, significant problems with the astronomical distance scale were resolved by dividing the Cepheids into different classes with very"
"Edward Robert Harrison Edward R. ""Ted"" Harrison (8 January 1919 – 29 January 2007) was a British astronomer and cosmologist, noted for his work about the increase of fluctuations in the expanding universe, for his explanation of Olbers' Paradox, and for his books on cosmology for lay readers. He spent much of his career at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and University of Arizona, USA. Harrison's education at Sir John Cass Technical Institute was interrupted by World War II, during which he served for six years with the British Army in various military campaigns, eventually serving as Radar Adviser to"
"most famous telescopes in observational astronomy of the 20th century. It was used by Edwin Hubble to make observations with which he produced two fundamental results which changed the scientific view of the Universe. Using observations he made in 1922–1923, Hubble was able to prove that the Universe extends beyond the Milky Way galaxy, and that several nebula were millions of light-years away. He then showed that the universe was expanding. Once the sixty-inch telescope project was well underway, Hale immediately set about creating a larger telescope. John D. Hooker provided crucial funding of $45,000 for the purchase and grinding"
"is uniformly expanding everywhere. This universal expansion was predicted from general relativity by Alexander Friedmann in 1922 and Georges Lemaître in 1927, well before Hubble made his 1929 analysis and observations, and it remains the cornerstone of the Big Bang theory as developed by Friedmann, Lemaître, Robertson, and Walker. The theory requires the relation formula_9 to hold at all times, where formula_7 is the comoving distance, ""v"" is the recessional velocity, and formula_6, formula_12, and formula_7 vary as the universe expands (hence we write formula_8 to denote the present-day Hubble ""constant""). For distances much smaller than the size of the"
"Edwin Hubble Edwin Powell Hubble (November 20, 1889 – September 28, 1953) was an American astronomer. He played a crucial role in establishing the fields of extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology and is regarded as one of the most important astronomers of all time. Hubble discovered that many objects previously thought to be clouds of dust and gas and classified as ""nebulae"" were actually galaxies beyond the Milky Way. He used the strong direct relationship between a classical Cepheid variable's luminosity and pulsation period (discovered in 1908 by Henrietta Swan Leavitt) for scaling galactic and extragalactic distances. Hubble provided evidence"
"the distance of remote objects. His discovery of increasing redshift in the light spectra emitted by distant objects is a major piece of evidence that the universe is expanding. The Hubble House remained in the family until about 1973. It is still a private residence. Edwin Hubble House The Edwin Hubble House is a historic house at 1340 Woodstock Road, in San Marino, California. Built in 1925, it was the home of astronomer Edwin Hubble (1889-1953) for most of his professional life. Hubble is renowned as one of the greatest astronomers of the 20th century, whose discoveries revolutionized the science."
"evidence that the Universe's expansion rate is now accelerating through monitoring of Type Ia Supernovae. The team's observations were contrary to the current theory that the expansion of the universe was slowing down; instead, by monitoring the color shifts in the light from supernovas from Earth, they discovered that these billion-year old novae were still accelerating. This result was also found nearly simultaneously by the Supernova Cosmology Project, led by Saul Perlmutter. The corroborating evidence between the two competing studies led to the acceptance of the accelerating universe theory, and initiated new research to understand the nature of the universe,"
"luminosity of galaxies due to galaxy evolution. Earlier, in 1917, Albert Einstein had found that his newly developed theory of general relativity indicated that the universe must be either expanding or contracting. Unable to believe what his own equations were telling him, Einstein introduced a cosmological constant (a """") to the equations to avoid this ""problem"". When Einstein learned of Hubble's redshifts, he immediately realized that the expansion predicted by general relativity must be real, and in later life he said that changing his equations was ""the biggest blunder of [his] life."" In fact, Einstein apparently once visited Hubble and"
"stars throughout endless space."" ""By grafting endless space onto the Copernican system and scattering the stars throughout this endless space, Digges pioneered... the idea of an unlimited universe filled with the mingling rays of countless stars."" An illustration of the Copernican universe can be seen at right. The outer inscription on the map reads: Thomas Digges Thomas Digges (; c. 1546 – 24 August 1595) was an English mathematician and astronomer. He was the first to expound the Copernican system in English but discarded the notion of a fixed shell of immoveable stars to postulate infinitely many stars at varying"
"by Einstein could not exist (it must either expand or contract). Lemaître made an explicit prediction that the universe should expand. He also derived a redshift-distance relationship, which is now known as the Hubble Law. Later, in 1931, Einstein himself agreed with the results of Friedmann and Lemaître. The expansion of the universe discovered by Edwin Hubble in 1929 was then considered by many (and continues to be considered by some now) as a direct confirmation of general relativity. In the 1930s, largely due to the work of E. A. Milne, it was realised that the linear relationship between redshift"
"of the Big Bang theory, the book tells the personal stories of the people who played a part in advancing it, both by hypothesis and by experiment. These include Einstein, for his General Relativity, Friedmann for first discovering that this theory led to an expanding universe, Lemaître who concluded independently of Friedman discovered an expanding universe, and then that the theory must lead to an initial event of creation, which is the Big Bang theory we know today, Hubble for observing that the universe expanded, thereby confirming Friedman and Lemaître, Gamow, Alpher, Herman, Ryle, Penzias and Wilson, among many others."
"Hubble bubble (astronomy) In astronomy, a Hubble bubble would be ""a departure of the local value of the Hubble constant from its globally averaged value,"" or, more technically, ""a local monopole in the peculiar velocity field, perhaps caused by a local void in the mass density."" The Hubble constant, named for astronomer Edwin Hubble, whose work made clear the expansion of the universe, measures the rate at which expansion occurs. In accordance with the Copernican principle that the Earth is not in a central, specially favored position, one would expect that measuring this constant at any point in the universe"
"a huge number of external galaxies beyond our own Milky Way; then, work by Vesto Slipher and others showed that the universe is expanding. These advances made it possible to speculate about the origin of the universe, and allowed the establishment of the Big Bang Theory, by Georges Lemaître, as the leading cosmological model. A few researchers still advocate a handful of alternative cosmologies; however, most cosmologists agree that the Big Bang theory explains the observations better. Dramatic advances in observational cosmology since the 1990s, including the cosmic microwave background, distant supernovae and galaxy redshift surveys, have led to the"
"reference which would allow individuals to easily see that they are moving. The smaller scales of these motions are too small to be detected conventionally with human senses. Spacetime (the fabric of the universe) is expanding meaning everything in the universe is stretching like a rubber band. This motion is the most obscure as it is not physical motion as such, but rather a change in the very nature of the universe. The primary source of verification of this expansion was provided by Edwin Hubble who demonstrated that all galaxies and distant astronomical objects were moving away from Earth, known"
"Hubble's law Hubble's law, also known as the Hubble–Lemaître law, is the observation in physical cosmology that: Hubble's law is considered the first observational basis for the expansion of the universe and today serves as one of the pieces of evidence most often cited in support of the Big Bang model. The motion of astronomical objects due solely to this expansion is known as the Hubble flow. Although widely attributed to Edwin Hubble, the law was first derived from the general relativity equations in 1922 by Alexander Friedmann. Friedmann published a set of equations, now known as the Friedmann equations,"
"universe. His final book, ""Masks of the Universe"" (2nd ed., 2003), questions current perceptions of reality, asking whether present cosmology, with ordinary matter, dark matter, plus dark energy, is yet only another ""mask"" obscuring a Universe which will remain perforce forever unknown to humans. Edward Robert Harrison Edward R. ""Ted"" Harrison (8 January 1919 – 29 January 2007) was a British astronomer and cosmologist, noted for his work about the increase of fluctuations in the expanding universe, for his explanation of Olbers' Paradox, and for his books on cosmology for lay readers. He spent much of his career at the"
"astronomer who established that the universe is expanding, also were made possible by Leavitt's groundbreaking research. Hubble often said that Leavitt deserved the Nobel Prize for her work. Mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler, a member of the Swedish Academy of Sciences, tried to nominate her for that prize in 1924, only to learn that she had died of cancer three years earlier. (The Nobel Prize is not awarded posthumously.) Lauren Gunderson wrote a play, ""Silent Sky"", which followed Leavitt's journey from her acceptance at Harvard to her death. George Johnson wrote a biography, ""Miss Leavitt's Stars"", which showcases the triumphs of women's"
"reasonably accurate measurement of the rate of expansion of the universe, a numerical value now known as the Hubble constant, was made in 1958 by astronomer Allan Sandage. His measured value for the Hubble constant came very close to the value range generally accepted today. However Sandage, like Einstein, did not believe his own results at the time of discovery. His value for the age of the universe was too short to reconcile with the 25-billion-year age estimated at that time for the oldest known stars. Sandage and other astronomers repeated these measurements numerous times, attempting to reduce the Hubble"
"a result of advances in telescope technology as well as the analysis of data from satellites such as COBE, the Hubble Space Telescope and WMAP. Cosmologists now have fairly precise and accurate measurements of many of the parameters of the Big Bang model, and have made the unexpected discovery that the expansion of the universe appears to be accelerating. The earliest and most direct observational evidence of the validity of the theory are the expansion of the universe according to Hubble's law (as indicated by the redshifts of galaxies), discovery and measurement of the cosmic microwave background and the relative"
"later Edwin Hubble confirmed the existence of cosmic expansion, and determined a more accurate value for the constant that now bears his name. Hubble inferred the recession velocity of the objects from their redshifts, many of which were earlier measured and related to velocity by Vesto Slipher in 1917. In October 2018, scientists presented a new third way (two earlier methods gave problematic results that do not agree), using information from gravitational wave events (especially those involving the merger of neutron stars, like GW170817), of determining the Hubble Constant, essential in establishing the exact rate of expansion of the universe."