• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 432 0

on the snowy morning of January 1, 1925. Hubble relayed that he had found twelve Cepheids in Andromeda and twenty-two in Triangulum, their telltale blinks indicating a distance for each of nearly a million light-years, confirming what others had gleaned with shakier methods. More than that, the 100-inch telescope had allowed Hubble to resolve the outer regions of the two nebulae into vast collections of stars. Astronomers could now be certain that the spirals were not simple nebulosities, not just clouds of dust and gas. At the end of his paper, Hubble hinted at more results to come, having by then sighted variable stars in M81, M101, and NGC 2403, some of the most commanding spirals in the celestial sky.

Astronomers in the audience could practically feel the universe changing as they listened to Russell—except for one. Curtis, who was briefly at the Washington meeting, took the announcement in stride. “As you know,” he wrote a former Lick colleague the next day, “I have always believed that the spirals are island universes, and Hubble's recent results appear to clinch this, though I myself did not need the confirmation.” You can almost hear him yawn between the lines.

Soon after Russell's presentation, the American Astronomical Society Council sent in its petition to the AAAS, nominating Hubble's paper (one of seventeen hundred presented at the conference that year) for the coveted prize. “Dr. Hubble,” the council stated, “has found that the outer parts of the two most conspicuous nebulae, in Andromeda and in Triangular [sic], are resolved upon his best photographs into ‘dense swarms of actual stars.’ This has been suspected as a possibility for a century, but has never previously been unequivocally proved… This paper is the product of a young man of conspicuous and recognized ability in a field which he has made peculiarly his own. It opens up depths of space previously inaccessible to investigation and gives promise of still greater advances in the near future. Meanwhile, it has already expanded one hundred fold the known volume of the material universe and has apparently settled the long-mooted question of the nature of the spirals, showing them to be gigantic agglomerations of stars almost comparable in extent with our own galaxy.”

Although the great distances to the two nebulae flagrantly disagreed with van Maanen's data, most astronomers quickly rallied around Hubble's figures. The Cepheids were fast becoming the gold standard for measuring distances to the more remote starry regions of the universe. Nearly everyone came to assume that van Maanen was mistaken. “The great distances recently derived have made rapid rotation impossible,” said Harvard astronomer Willem Luyten, “and the quick internal motion measured some years ago is now universally regarded as an optical illusion.” James Jeans confirmed Hubble's distance results with an alternate technique and wrote Hubble that “van Maanen's measurements have to go.” The long and convoluted squabble on the nature of the spiral nebulae—centuries of debate—was finally over. The spirals were not adjuncts of the Milky Way at all but instead galaxies in their own right. The universe officially became far larger—and far more intriguing.

Edwin Hubble and James Jeans at the 100-inch telescope

(Reproduced by permission of the Huntington Library,

San Marino, California)

Russell's instincts, it turns out, were very good. Hubble in the end won the AAAS award for extending the boundaries of the known universe. He was informed by telegram on February 7, but the amount he received was cut by half. The young astronomer was told he was sharing the award with another scientist. Parasitologist Lemuel Cleveland of the School of Hygiene and Public Health at Johns Hopkins was also honored for his study of microscopic protozoa found inside the digestive tracts of termites. He showed that the tiny organisms were essential for a termite to digest cellulose. “To scientists,” reported the Los Angeles Times, “the infinite and the infinitesimal are merely relative terms, alike in importance.