1924年12月30日,，愛德華·哈勃宣布仙女座螺旋星云實際上是一個星系,，而銀河系只不過是宇宙中許許多多的星系中的一個。

1924: Astronomer Edwin Hubble announces that the spiral nebula Andromeda is actually a galaxy and that the Milky Way is just one of many galaxies in the universe.

1924年12月30日,，愛德華·哈勃宣布仙女座螺旋星云實際上是一個星系,，而銀河系只不過是宇宙中許許多多的星系中的一個。Before Copernicus and Galileo, humans thought our world was the center of creation. Then (except for a few notable stragglers) we learned that the sun and planets did not revolve around the Earth, and we discovered that our sun — though the center of our solar system and vitally important to us — was not the center of the universe or even a major star in our galaxy.

在哥白尼和伽利略之前,，人們認為我們的世界是創(chuàng)世的中心,。后來（除了一些頑固不化的顯貴）我們認識到太陽和其他星球并不是繞著地球轉動，而太陽——盡管處于太陽系的中心并對我們十分重要——并不是宇宙的中心,，甚至不是銀行系中的一顆主要行星,。But we still grandiosely thought our own dear Milky Way contained all or most of the stars in existence. We were about to be knocked off our egotistical little pedestal once again.

但我們仍幻想著我們所處的銀河系包含了所有，或者少是大部分存在的行星,。然而我們以自我為中心的自作多情很快就要再次受到打擊了,。Edwin Hubble was born in Missouri in 1889 and moved to Chicago in 1898. In high school, he broke the state record in the high jump, and went on to play basketball for the University of Chicago. He won a Rhodes scholarship and studied law at Oxford. He earned a Ph.D. in astronomy, but practiced law in Kentucky. After serving in World War I and rising to the rank of major, he got bored with law and returned to astronomy.

1889年愛德華·哈勃生于密蘇里州，于1898年搬至芝加哥,。在他上高中的時候,，他打破了跳高的州記錄，并為芝加哥大學的籃球隊效力,。他獲得過羅氏獎學金,，又在劍橋讀了法律。他是天文學博士畢業(yè),，卻在肯塔基州做律師,。他在第一次世界大戰(zhàn)中服役，并升至陸軍少校職位,，之后他便對法律失去了興趣,，又回到了他的天文學老本行。He trained the powerful new 100-inch telescope at Mount Wilson in Southern California on spiral nebulae. These fuzzy patches of light in the sky were generally thought to be clouds of gas or dust within our galaxy, which was presumed to include everything in the universe except the Magellanic Clouds. Some nebulae seemed to contain a few stars, but nothing like the multitudes of the Milky Way.

他將位于南加利福尼亞威爾遜山的強大的直徑100英寸的新式望遠鏡對準螺旋星系,。照片上模糊的光斑歷來被當作是銀河系中的星云或塵埃,，它們被認為包括了除麥哲倫星云以外宇宙中所有的東西。一些星云似乎包含一些恒星，但和銀河系比起來還是小巫見大巫了,。Hubble not only found a number of stars in Andromeda, he found Cepheid variable stars. These stars vary from bright to dim, and a very smart Harvard computationist named Henrietta Leavitt had discovered in 1912 that you could measure distance with them. Given the brightness of the star and its period — the length of time it takes to go from bright to dim and back again — you could determine how far away it is.

哈勃不僅發(fā)現了仙女座星系中的大量恒星,，他還發(fā)現了造父變星（Cepheid variable stars）。這些恒星由亮到暗周期性變化,，一位聰明的哈佛大學計算機專家萊維特（Henrietta Leavitt）在1912年發(fā)現可以用這些恒星來測量距離,。只要知道這種恒星的亮度和它的周期——它由亮變暗往復一次的時間——你就能計算出它離你有多遠。Hubble used Leavitt’s formula to calculate that Andromeda was approximately 860,000 light years away. That’s more than eight times the distance to the farthest stars in the Milky Way. This conclusively proved that the nebulae are separate star systems and that our galaxy is not the universe.

哈勃用萊維特的方法計算出仙女座距我們約860,000光年,，這比銀河系中離我們最遠的恒星的距離的八倍還多,。這有力地說明了這個星系是一個獨立的星體系統(tǒng)，而我們的銀河系并非整個宇宙,。Cosmic though it was, the news did not make the front page of The New York Times. The paper did notice the following Feb. 25 that Hubble and a public health researcher split a $1,000 prize ($12,500 in today’s money) from the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

雖然這則消息十分偉大,，但它還是沒能登上《紐約時報》的封面,。不過在接下來的2月25日報紙報道了哈勃和另一位公共健康研究人員共同分享了美國協(xié)會提供的科學進步獎,，兩人平分1000美元（合今天的12500美元）獎金。Hubble went on to discover another couple of dozen galaxies. Before the 1920s were over, he added another astronomical achievement to his reputation. By analyzing the Doppler effect on the spectroscopic signals of receding stars, he established that their red shift was proportional to their distance.

哈勃后來又去研究了其他許多星系,，在19世紀20年代結束之前,，他又在他的天文成就上寫下了濃墨重彩的一筆。通過分析那些離我們遠去的恒星光譜信號的多普勒效應,，他得出了這些恒星的紅移與他們和我們的距離成正比的結論,。When the 200-inch Mount Palomar telescope was completed in January 1949, Hubble was honored to be the first astronomer to use it. He died in 1953. NASA named its space telescope after him.

當1949年1月位于加州帕勒莫山的新天文望遠鏡建成時，哈勃被授予了最先使用它的榮譽,。哈勃于1953年去世,，后來NASA用他的名字命名宇宙望遠鏡。