Edwin Hubble and the Discovery of Redshift

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Edwin Hubble may have been the greatest disruptor of our understanding of the universe in the 20th century.

Try one or some of these lesson/inquiry ideas with your class:
1. Find a graph of Hubble's Law and analyze it. Note the distance is across the x-axis and velocity is along the y-axis. What are the units on these numbers? What is the difference between a light year and a parsec? What can be noticed about the velocity of the closer galaxies compared to the more distant ones?
2. What is a reflector telescope? Find a cross sectional drawing of one and copy and label it. Hubble's telescope was a 100 inch reflector. That's a big mirror!! Use the formula for area of a circle and compare the area of a 100" mirror to a 50" mirror to a 10" mirror. Can you see the advantage of having a larger surface area?
3. Research the Mt. Wilson Observatory. What is happening there today? Have any other great discoveries been made using it? What is the biggest ground-based telescope in the world today? What are the pros and cons of ground-based versus space-based telescopes?
4. If we live in a redshifted universe, then what would it be like to live in a blue shifted universe? Research blue shift. Will there ever be a "Big Crunch"?
5. If you have spectroscopes, allow students to look at several light sources and compare what they have seen. Hopefully you have access to gas tubes of various elements. Discuss the work of Hubble and how he used these spectra to answer the question "what are the stars"?
6. Have students discuss the three major discoveries of Hubble and perhaps draw them. Representing scientific concepts artistically is often the first step to understanding.