Wikinventia — Atlas of discoveries and inventions · Industrial Age

Hubble's Law — discovery of the expanding universe

1929 AD · Transmission: Global
AstronomyPhysicsDiscoveryNorth American

Edwin Hubble publishes the linear relationship between galaxy distance and recession velocity (redshift), establishing convincing observational evidence that the universe is expanding. The finding, based on his own program of distance measurement via Cepheids and on redshifts measured by Vesto Slipher, transformed cosmology from a static to a dynamic model, mathematically grounded Big Bang theory, and gave rise to the concept of the Hubble constant (H₀) as the fundamental measure of the rate of cosmic expansion.

InstitutionMount Wilson Observatory
Historical regionUSA
Primary sourceHubble, E. (1929), "A relation between distance and radial velocity among extra-galactic nebulae", PNAS 15(3), 168-173. DOI: 10.1073/pnas.15.3.168
Secondary sourceHubble's Law and the expanding universe, PNAS 112 (2015); The Hubble Constant, Living Reviews in Relativity (2015)
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