Astronomy

The story begins with Vesto Slipher, an astronomer from Lowell Observatory, Flagstaff, Arizona, who finds that far nebula shows more red spectra than it should be. Astronomer Edwin Hubble and his colleague, Milton Humason, which have know the way to calculate galactic distance discovered that the redshift in light coming from distant galaxies is proportional to their distance. This become known as Hubble’s Law and considered the first observational basis for the expanding space paradigm and today serves as one of the most often cited pieces of evidence in support of the Big Bang theory.

Even Albert Einstein has been deceived with static cosmos idea. On his general relativity theory, which published in 1915, he found that cosmos ought to be expanding. When he realized that the solution of his equations subject to the constraints of the cosmological principle led to universes that were not static, he was dismayed because at the time the expansion of the Universe had not yet been discovered by Hubble. This led Einstein to make mathematical constant on his field equations that stabilized the universe against expansion or contraction. This term has come to be known as the cosmological constant or the vacuum energy density. With this new term, Einstein obtained a static solution.

Later, when Hubble demonstrated that the Universe was actually not static but expanding, Einstein realized that he had missed a tremendous opportunity. If he had possessed sufficient confidence in his original equations, he would have predicted that either his theory was wrong or the Universe was expanding or contracting, well before there was experimental evidence of the expansion.

Einstein’s comment for the Hubble’s discovery is, if the discovery rise on ten years before, there is no cosmological constant, which he later characterized as the “greatest blunder of his life”.

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