About this design
I have always had an interest in astronomy, especially cosmology and the history of the universe.
Before Edwin Hubble, it was commonly believed that the universe was steady, unchanging and quite small (it was thought to be the size of our galaxy, the milky way). Edwin Hubble changed that way of thinking. In 1923 and 1924, Hubble used the largest telescope in the world, the 100-inch Hooker Telescope at Mt. Wilson to examine the Andromeda “Nebula”. By comparing how bright the stars appeared with how much light they actually gave off, he estimated the distance to the nebula as nearly a million light-years, meaning it must be a huge galaxy in its own right.
Hubble went on to find the distances to many other galaxies after Andromeda, eventually pushing the frontiers of the universe out to hundreds of millions of light-years. He then compared the distances to the speeds with which the galaxies were moving and was suprised to find that every galaxy he found (except Andromeda) was racing away from us, and deduced that the farther away the galaxy is, the faster it moved. This relation, known as Hubble’s Law, was observational proof that the universe was expanding. My design shows Hubble, with a galaxy & the Hooker telescope behind him with a spectrum of a distant star underneath his name, and a grid & some arrows in the background that signify the expanding universe.
(...if you were wondering why Andromeda wasn't racing away from us, it is because it is one of our neighboring galaxies within the group of galaxies the milky way is part of, called the "Local Group". The Local Group consists of approximately 30 galaxies, with its centre lying between us & Andromeda).
