1924年12月30日，爱德华·哈勃宣布仙女座螺旋星云实际上是一个星系，而银河系只不过是宇宙中许许多多的星系中的一个。
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，爱德华·哈勃宣布仙女座螺旋星云实际上是一个星系，而银河系只不过是宇宙中许许多多的星系中的一个。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，人们认为我们的世界是创世的中心。后来（除了一些顽固不化的显贵）我们认识到太阳和其他星球并不是绕着地球转动，而太阳——尽管处于太阳系的中心并对我们十分重要——并不是宇宙的中心，甚至不是银行系中的一颗主要行星。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.
但我们仍幻想着我们所处的银河系包含了所有，或者少是大部分存在的行星。然而我们以自我为中心的自作多情很快就要再次受到打击了。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年爱德华·哈勃生于密苏里州，于1898年搬至芝加哥。在他上高中的时候，他打破了跳高的州记录，并为芝加哥大学的篮球队效力。他获得过罗氏奖学金，又在剑桥读了法律。他是天文学博士毕业，却在肯塔基州做律师。他在第一次世界大战中服役，并升至陆军少校职位，之后他便对法律失去了兴趣，又回到了他的天文学老本行。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.
他将位于南加利福尼亚威尔逊山的强大的直径100英寸的新式望远镜对准螺旋星系。照片上模糊的光斑历来被当作是银河系中的星云或尘埃，它们被认为包括了除麦哲伦星云以外宇宙中所有的东西。一些星云似乎包含一些恒星，但和银河系比起来还是小巫见大巫了。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.
哈勃不仅发现了仙女座星系中的大量恒星，他还发现了造父变星（Cepheid variable stars）。这些恒星由亮到暗周期性变化，一位聪明的哈佛大学计算机专家莱维特（Henrietta Leavitt）在1912年发现可以用这些恒星来测量距离。只要知道这种恒星的亮度和它的周期——它由亮变暗往复一次的时间——你就能计算出它离你有多远。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.
哈勃用莱维特的方法计算出仙女座距我们约860,000光年，这比银河系中离我们最远的恒星的距离的八倍还多。这有力地说明了这个星系是一个独立的星体系统，而我们的银河系并非整个宇宙。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.
虽然这则消息十分伟大，但它还是没能登上《纽约时报》的封面。不过在接下来的2月25日报纸报道了哈勃和另一位公共健康研究人员共同分享了美国协会提供的科学进步奖，两人平分1000美元（合今天的12500美元）奖金。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.
哈勃后来又去研究了其他许多星系，在19世纪20年代结束之前，他又在他的天文成就上写下了浓墨重彩的一笔。通过分析那些离我们远去的恒星光谱信号的多普勒效应，他得出了这些恒星的红移与他们和我们的距离成正比的结论。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.
当1949年1月位于加州帕勒莫山的新天文望远镜建成时，哈勃被授予了最先使用它的荣誉。哈勃于1953年去世，后来NASA用他的名字命名宇宙望远镜。
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