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Hubble's Theory

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Astronomers for thousands of years were faced with uncertainty regarding the physical size of the universe. Since adequate technology didn’t yet exist to provide a more empirical understanding of the mysterious heavens above, astronomers had to rely on speculative reasoning. The argument often came down to either the universe is finite and has defined boundaries, or it is boundless, extending infinitely in every direction; as time progressed, popular opinion trended towards the former. However, in the early 20th century there was a paradigm shift in humanity’s view as a result of the improvement of our scientific understanding of the universe. We now know that the universe does not have a fixed size, but is actually expanding in all directions. …show more content…
Hubble, who had access to the world’s largest telescope at the time, was able to make measurements of spectra from galaxies much further away than Slipher ever could. After several years of very tedious work, Hubble and his team at the Mount Wilson Observatory had accrued a considerable amount of spectral data for many galaxies with known distances. A linear relationship interestingly emerged when the distance to these galaxies was plotted against their redshift-determined velocities: the further a galaxy is from earth, the faster it is moving away from us. This implied that virtually every point in space was getting further from every other point in space as time progresses. A useful visual analogy is to think of the universe as a loaf of bread being baked in the oven. Imagine the bread has some raisins placed on top of it in a line, and each raisin symbolizes a galaxy in space. Now, as the bread is baked (symbolizing the passage of time), the bread expands, and each raisin gets further apart from every other raisin, but the raisins at the end of the line will spread apart the fastest while raisins right next to one another will spread apart the slowest, just as galaxies farthest from earth will move away the fastest. This distance-velocity relationship transformed humanity’s view of the universe from a static one to one of expansion. This discovery simultaneously answered one question but opened up many new ones for

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