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more its light is stretched, and there is a very simple relationship between the distance and the redshift. Why is this? Well, the interpretation of Hubble’s result is quite remarkable. The more distant the galaxy, the further the light has travelled across the Universe to reach us. Also, the further it has travelled, the more it has been stretched. This relationship between distance travelled and amount of stretching occurs when something very simple but surprising is happening to the Universe. It is expanding! In other words, over the hundreds of millions of years during which the light has been travelling, space itself has been stretching at a relatively constant rate, and this has stretched the wavelength of the light in direct proportion to the distance it has had to travel. This is why the most distant galaxies have the largest redshift – their light has travelled through our expanding universe for longer and has therefore become more stretched. Hubble’s discovery of this so-called ‘cosmological redshift’ was one of the great intellectual moments in twentieth-century science, because he discovered that we live in an expanding universe.

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HUBBLE’S LAW: This diagram illustrates Hubble’s Law; the redshift of the light from distant galaxies is plotted against their actual distance, resulting in a straight line on the graph.

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Stephan’s Quintet is a cluster of five galaxies in the constellation Pegasus, two of which, in the centre, appear to be intertwined. Studying the individual redshifts reveals that one of the galaxies is an interloper: the larger, bluer one at upper left is in fact a foreground galaxy seven times closer to us than the others. So redshifts allow us to create a three-dimensional model of the Universe.

NASA

REDSHIFT

Although first discovered in the early twentieth century, redshifts were really put into their cosmological context through the work of Edwin Hubble. He discovered that there is a very simple relationship between the distance and the redshift of a galaxy – the further away a galaxy is, the greater its redshift. This is because the further light has had to travel, the more the travelling light is stretched, and this occurs when the Universe is expanding.

Nathalie Lees © HarperCollins

There is a vast amount of information contained within Hubble’s simple graph. Redshift can be expressed as the amount of stretching you would see if something were flying away from you at a particular speed. The ratio of the redshift expressed in this way to the distance to the galaxy – which is the gradient of the line on Hubble’s graph – is called the Hubble constant. Its value as measured today is 68 kilometres (42 miles) per second, per megaparsec. A megaparsec is a measure of distance commonly used by astronomers – 1 megaparsec is 3.3 million light years. So, another way to think of Hubble’s law is that a galaxy that is 3.3 million light years away will be receding from us at a velocity of about 70 kilometres (45 miles) per second. That’s pretty slow! A galaxy that is 6.6 million light years away will be receding at about 140 kilometres (90 miles) per second, and so on. And further, if you simply invert the Hubble constant, then you get a number with the units of time. For a Hubble constant of 70 kilometres (45 miles) per second per megaparsec, this corresponds to 14.3 billion years, which can be interpreted as the age of the Universe! (For the more mathematically inclined, you can calculate this number easily by converting megaparsecs to kilometres.) As an aside, the attentive reader might have noticed that our current best measurement for the age of the Universe is slightly lower than this, at 13.75 billion years; this is because precision measurements over the last few decades have shown us that the expansion of the Universe is not in strict accord with Hubble’s simple law. The best data we have today tells us that the Universe is accelerating in its expansion due to the presence of something called dark energy.

Hubble’s discovery of the cosmological redshift brought