Edwin Hubble Trivia
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48 free Edwin Hubble trivia questions with answers — science & nature quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Edwin Hubble was a high-school track star and Big Ten basketball champion who studied law at Oxford to please his dying father, then went to Mount Wilson and proved the universe was vastly bigger than the Milky Way. In 1929 he showed that galaxies recede faster the farther away they are, the observation that made Einstein abandon his "biggest blunder". This quiz is about the astronomer, not the space telescope, though the telescope gets a question too. Easy questions ask what he proved about the nebulae, which telescope carries his name and which law bears it. Harder ones want the star type he used as a yardstick, the Harvard rival who opposed him, the newspaper that broke his discovery, his wildly wrong value for the constant, the Belgian priest who got there first, the wartime job that earned him a Legion of Merit, the comet and asteroid he found, why he never got a Nobel Prize and where he is buried, which nobody knows. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's biography of Edwin Hubble, and each question carries the sentence that supports it. Made for astronomy teachers, students and quiz hosts. Related quizzes: Hubble Space Telescope, Astronomy and Famous Physicists.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which Space Shuttle carried the telescope named after Edwin Hubble into orbit in April 1990?
Discovery
Discovery released the Hubble Space Telescope in April 1990. It orbits above the atmosphere because moving air distorts starlight, the same effect that makes stars twinkle from the ground.
Q 02What does Hubble's 1929 finding that galaxies recede faster with distance imply about the universe?
It is expanding
It is expanding: the farther away a galaxy lies, the faster it recedes. Run that expansion backwards and everything starts out together, which is why Hubble's law became a pillar of the Big Bang theory.
Q 03Which pulsating stars, whose period-luminosity relation Henrietta Leavitt found, did Hubble use to measure distances?
Cepheid variables
Cepheid variables pulse with a period tied to their true luminosity, so comparing observed brightness with luminosity yields distance; Hubble found Cepheids in spiral nebulae with the Mount Wilson reflector.
Q 04In which US state was Edwin Hubble born in 1889, in the small town of Marshfield?
Missouri
Missouri: Hubble was born in Marshfield in 1889. His father's job kept the family on the move, and Edwin finished his schooling in Illinois.
Q 05What did Hubble have fitted at home for his cat Nicolas Copernicus, saying cats need one 'for their self-respect'?
A cat door
A cat door was duly made for the black cat. He had the run of the house, which came to be called 'Nicolas' estate'.
Q 06Which English novelist became a close friend of Edwin and Grace Hubble in California?
Aldous Huxley
Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria grew close to the Hubbles in California. Fame had pulled the astronomer into Hollywood circles, where he mixed with film stars as well as writers.
Q 07For which university did Hubble play on a conference-champion basketball team?
Chicago
Chicago: Hubble was on the university's 1909 championship basketball team. As a young man he was better known as an athlete than as a scholar, and he competed in track and field as well.
Q 08For which future Nobel-winning physicist did Hubble work as a student laboratory assistant?
Robert Millikan
Robert Millikan employed Hubble as a student laboratory assistant for a year. The two ended up in the same city: Millikan ran Caltech in Pasadena from 1921, where Hubble had his Mount Wilson office.
Q 09What did Hubble study at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, bowing to his father's wishes?
Jurisprudence
Jurisprudence, the theory of law, was his father's choice, and Hubble took his Oxford degree in it. He came home with an English accent and a pipe, habits he kept up in America.
Q 10Alongside physics and maths, which language did Hubble teach at New Albany High School in Indiana?
Spanish
Spanish: Hubble had studied it at Oxford, and he taught it with physics and maths while coaching the school's basketball team. After a year he left the classroom for graduate school in astronomy.
Q 11Where did Hubble earn his 1917 PhD with a dissertation on faint nebulae?
Yerkes Observatory
Yerkes Observatory in Wisconsin was where Hubble photographed faint nebulae for his doctorate. When America entered the war in 1917 he rushed the thesis through, took his oral exam and reported for army duty three days later.
Q 12What rank did Hubble reach in the US Army's 86th Division during the First World War?
Major
Hubble enlisted in 1917 after hurrying through his doctorate and rose to major in the 86th Division, which reached France in 1918 but was broken up for replacements and never fought.
Q 13Who offered Hubble a staff position at Mount Wilson Observatory in 1919?
George Ellery Hale
Q 21Hubble's 1929 figures implied that the universe was only about how old?
2 billion years
2 billion years was the awkward answer, because radioactive dating already made the Earth's rocks older than that. The fault lay in his distances, which were several times too short.
Q 22Which Belgian priest-physicist predicted the redshift-distance law two years before Hubble?
Georges Lemaître
Georges Lemaître derived the velocity–distance relation in a 1927 paper in a Belgian journal; a 2011 study by Mario Livio showed Lemaître himself trimmed the later English translation.
Q 23To avoid saying what the redshifts meant, which word did Hubble put before 'velocities' in a letter to de Sitter?
"Apparent"
George Ellery Hale first made the offer in 1917, then held the post open while Hubble went to war. Hubble headed straight for Mount Wilson when he got back to America in 1919.
Q 14Which instrument, then the world's largest of its kind, was newly completed when Hubble arrived at Mount Wilson?
The 100-inch Hooker Telescope
The 100-inch Hooker Telescope began regular work just as Hubble arrived in 1919, and it stayed the world's largest for three decades. Its reach let him pick out single stars inside the spiral nebulae.
Q 15Hubble's variable-star distances, announced in 1924, showed which two nebulae to be separate galaxies?
Andromeda and Triangulum
Hubble's variable-star distances put the Andromeda and Triangulum nebulae (M31 and M33) nearly a million light-years away, far beyond any estimate of the Milky Way's size.
Q 16Who argued in the 1920 Great Debate that the spiral nebulae lay within the Milky Way?
Harlow Shapley
Harlow Shapley argued in the 1920 debate with Heber Curtis that the spirals lay inside our own galaxy. When Hubble's letter arrived with the evidence against him, he reportedly called it the letter that 'destroyed my universe'.
Q 17In which newspaper were Hubble's findings on the nebulae first published, on November 23, 1924?
The New York Times
The New York Times carried the discovery on 23 November 1924, before any scientific journal. Astronomers got the formal version weeks later, in a paper read to their society's meeting on New Year's Day 1925.
Q 18Hubble's galaxy classification, with its two branches of spirals, is usually drawn as a diagram nicknamed after which object?
Tuning fork
Tuning fork: elliptical galaxies run along the handle, then the diagram splits into two prongs, one for ordinary spirals and one for barred spirals like our own Milky Way.
Q 19Which objects did Hubble mistake for bright stars in far-off galaxies, making his distances too small?
Glowing gas clouds
Glowing gas clouds of hydrogen passed for single bright stars on his plates, so their galaxies seemed closer than they were. Hubble knew the risk, and his relative distances still held up.
Q 20Which two astronomers' redshift measurements did Hubble combine with his distances?
Vesto Slipher and Milton Humason
Vesto Slipher and Milton Humason supplied the speeds, Slipher having clocked the first nebular redshifts at Lowell Observatory. Humason had started at Mount Wilson as a mule driver and janitor before he became an observer.
"Apparent" velocities was his phrase, chosen to stress what had been measured. What it meant, he told de Sitter, should be left to "the very few others who are competent to discuss the matter with authority".
Q 24What did Einstein reportedly call the cosmological constant he'd added to keep the universe static?
"The biggest blunder of my life"
"The biggest blunder of my life" is how Einstein reportedly described the constant, in a remark passed on by George Gamow. After seeing Hubble's redshift data he dropped the term from his equations.
Q 25On his famous 1923 plate, Hubble wrote VAR! after crossing out his first label for which kind of object?
A nova
A nova was his first guess, marked N, until he saw that the star brightened and faded on a regular cycle. That rhythm gave its distance, which put the nebula around it far outside the Milky Way.
Q 26Which magazine put Edwin Hubble on its cover in February 1948?
Time
Time ran his portrait on its cover of 9 February 1948. By then he was famous enough to mix with Hollywood film stars as easily as with astronomers.
Q 27Hubble never took to the word 'galaxies', so what did he title his 1936 book about them?
The Realm of the Nebulae
The Realm of the Nebulae grew out of lectures he gave at Yale in 1935. To the end he called galaxies 'extragalactic nebulae', so the old word went on the cover.
Q 28Which assistant of Hubble's carried on his cosmology programme after his death in 1953?
Allan Sandage
Allan Sandage was a graduate student working for Hubble in his last years. He took over the observing programme in 1953, saw his mentor's unfinished galaxy classification into print and spent decades refining the distances.
Q 29Hubble never fully accepted that redshifts meant galaxies were fleeing, so what did he suggest might cause them instead?
An unknown law of physics
An unknown law of physics was the alternative Hubble kept open to the end of his life. His own galaxy counts seemed to fit a universe at rest better, and he would not rule out some principle nobody had yet recognised.
Q 30Where did Hubble spend the Second World War running ballistics research for the US Army?
Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland
Aberdeen Proving Ground, Maryland, was where the War Department sent him when he asked for active army service. He ran ballistics research and a supersonic wind tunnel there until 1946, and won a medal for it.