Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae is both the biography of an extraordinary human being and the story of the greatest quest in the history of astronomy since the Copernican revolution. The book is a revealing portrait of scientific genius, an incisive engaging history of ideas, and a shimmering evocation of what we see when gazing at the stars. Born in 1889 and reared in the village of Marshfield, Missouri, Edwin Powell Hubble-star athlete, Rhodes Scholar, military officer, and astronomer- became one of the towering figures in twentieth-century science. Hubble worked with the great 100-inch Hooker telescope at California's Mount Wilson Observatory and made a series of discoveries that revolutionized humanity's vision of the cosmos. In 1923 he was able to confirm the existence of other nebulae (now known to be galaxies) beyond our own Milky Way. By the end of the decade, Hubble had proven that the universe is expanding, thus laying the very cornerstone of the big bang theory of creation. It was Hubble who developed the elegant scheme by which the galaxies are classified as ellipticals and spirals, and it was Hubble who first provided reliable evidence that the universe is homogeneous, the same in all directions as far as the telescope can see. An incurable Anglophile with a penchant for tweed jackets and English briars, Hubble, together with his brilliant and witty wife, Grace Burke, became a fixture in Hollywood society in the 1930s and 40s. They counted among their friends Charlie Chaplin, the Marx brothers, Anita Loos, Aldous and Maria Huxley, Walt Disney, Helen Hayes, and William Randolph Hearst. Albert Einstein, a frequent visitor to Southern California, called Hubble's work "beautiful" and modified his equations on relativity to account for the discovery that the cosmos is expanding.

A beautiful picture book about the astronomer Edwin Hubble that invites children to ponder How many stars are in the sky? How did the universe begin? Where diid it come from?

It was not always known that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies in the universe. Edwin Hubble is the man who discovered this startling idea and that the universe was expanding. As a result of these discoveries, Hubble became an international celebrity, and is remembered today as a genius of science.

Traces the life and work of the man whose study of galaxies led to a new understanding of the universe.

No modern astronomer made a more profound contribution to our understanding of the cosmos than did Edwin Hubble, who first conclusively demonstrated that the universe is expanding. Basing his theory on the observation of the change in distanct galaxies, called red shift, Hubble showed that this is a Doppler effect, or alteration in the wavelength of light, resulting from the rapid motion of celestial objects away from Earth. In 1935, Hubble described his principal observations and conclusions in the Silliman lectures at Yale University. These lectures were published the following year as "The Realm of the Nebulae," which quickly became a classic work.

This book is the first complete account of the scientific life and work of Edwin Hubble, whose discoveries firmly established the United States as the leading nation in observational astronomy. One of the outstanding astronomers of the twentieth century, Hubble discovered the expansion of the Universe. He opened the world of galaxies for science when he showed that spiral nebulae beyond the Milky Way are galaxies extending to the limits of the Universe, and participating in a general expansion of the cosmos. The exploding Universe of Hubble, now termed the Big Bang, determined the origin of the elements, of galaxies and of the stars. The second part of the book describes the fundamental discoveries on the nature of the Universe made subsequently, and thus sets his achievements in context. Written by two prominent astronomers who have built on Hubble's work, this book is a classic of science, setting out the thrilling story of the exploding Universe.

Traces the life and work of Edwin Hubble, who discovered that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies and that the universe is expanding.