Astronomer Edwin Hubble announced the discovery of other galaxies on this date in 1924.



Source:  Joyce Sutphen, The Writ'ers Almanac


Excerpt: Astronomer Edwin Hubble announced the discovery of other galaxies on this date in 1924. At the time it was thought that our Milky Way galaxy represented the entirety of the universe. Hubble was studying the Andromeda Nebula .... Hubble crunched the numbers and realized that the star he was observing was 800 thousand light years away, more than eight times the distance of the farthest star in the Milky Way. ...he realized that the "cloud of gas" he'd been observing was really another vast galaxy that was very far away....

writersalmanac.publicradio.org/index.php

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