Astronomy Cast: Edwin Hubble

This Astronomy Cast episode discussed not the Hubble telescope, but the astronomer behind it all, Edwin Hubble. Edwin Powell Hubble was born in a small town in Missouri called Marshfield n November 29th, 1889. In 1898, his family moved to Chicago and he attended high school.He actually ended up at Oxford University on a Rhodes scholarship. he actually ceased his astronomy studies here and studied law. He didn't know what he wanted to do with his life. In 1913, he returned from England and taught at New Albany High School in New Albany, Indiana. Here, he taught Spanish, physics, and math. He also coached the boys' basketball team. set up a small practice in Louisville, Kentucky. However, soon he realized his heart wasn't in law, but in astronomy. He went on to study at the Yerkes Observatory and in 1917, he received a doctorate in astronomy from the University of Chicago. He was a member of the Kappa Sigma Fraternity. His other hobbies included dry-fly fishing and amateur boxing. He served for a short while in the first World War, and then took a job at the Mount Wilson Observatory in California. here he took many photos of Cepheid objects through reflecting Hooker telescopes, concluding that they were outside of our galaxy and determining the presence of several other galaxies such as our own milky way, which had until then been believed to be the universe. Edwin Hubble also devised a classification system for the galaxies he observed, distinguishing them by content, distance, shape, and brightness.

Astronomy Cast: Mysteries of the Milky Way

Globular clusters are thought to be a large group of stars all formed at the same time. Blue stragglers are stars in globular clusters that are still on the main sequence where they don’t belong. They are blue and big and massive stars. They may have formed when two other stars collided or a merger of two stars. Statistics point towards it, but there is no visual evidence.There should be 2 to 3 supernovae every century in the Milky Way. The last one seen was in 1680 and one in 1987 in the Magellanic Cloud. We’re missing 10 supernovae statistically. Some may be hidden by gas and dust and could be hidden where we can’t see them.We don’t know for sure if the Magellanic Clouds are satellites of the Milky Way. They may not be gravitationally bound to the Milky Way or to each other, but sometimes it seems like they are. They have more active star formation than the Milky Way does.