the great debate (11. 041)

Via Slashdot, we are directed towards the centenary of when astronomer Edwin Hubble imaged a cepheid variable star (not a nova, N) in the constellation of Andromeda and ultimately settled the above, long-standing cosmological quandary concerning whether the Universe consisted of more than our own Milky Way, greatly expanding our horizons and astronomical perspective in demonstrating that the object heretofore regarded as a nebula and stellar nursery was a complete galaxy similar to our own some two-hundred fifty million light years distant. Sponsored by the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, the debate held on on 26 April 1920 pitted astronomers Harlow Shapley, who maintained that the spiral nebulae observed were within the confines of our galaxy, against Heber Curtis who argued that they were independent galactic structures (“island universes,” as Immanuel Kant proposed in 1755 but never accepted by the scientific community due to the scales involved), very large and far, far away. A decade later, Hubble would go on to demonstrate that the apparently static Universe was in fact expanding.