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Topic: Edwin Powell Hubble

Today we honor Edwin Powell Hubble, who was born on this date in 1889, and is the man for whom the Hubble Space Telescope—orbiting the earth since 1990—was named. Naming the great telescope for Hubble was fitting; Hubble is credited with enormously expanding our view of the universe.

Hubble famously looked through the largest and most powerful telescope of his day and spotted stars outside Andromeda. His discoveries established that our Milky Way is not the only galaxy in the universe. Hubble also went on to develop Hubble's Law, the ground zero of the Big Bang theory. According to Hubble's Law, the more distant a galaxy is from earth, the faster it is racing away from earth. This theory—and the concept of an ever-expanding universe—caused Einstein to revise his Theory of Relativity.

Although Hubble did not make a lexical contribution, the greatest astronomer of the 20th century did have one lexical quirk. When it came to naming the very large groups of stars and associated matter found throughout the universe, Hubble preferred the term nebulae to galaxy. Nebula has ancestral kin in the Latin word for mist and the Greek word for cloud, while galaxy was born in the Greek word for milk. (Remember that gas and dust in interstellar space do look milky). But Hubble's preference did not spread, and in the English speaking part of the Milky Way, galaxy is still used.

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