Background 9

So anyway, back to Hubble. Yes so he discovered this wonderful new way to measure the distance of stars and things so what does he do? Of course, he applied it to the stars that he didn’t know the distance to. In particular he applied it to the Messier objects. You know what he found? He looked at their red shift and saw those blobs were moving away from us really fast, and, according to his new found discovery, this meant they were really really far away from us, much farther than any of the other stars. And they weren’t stars! So after we could see them in better detail and found that most of these objects where made up of hundreds and hundreds of stars. They were whole other neighborhoods of the universe, whole other Milky Ways. So we had found other galaxies. It was phenomenal; suddenly the universe was a much bigger place. Here is a picture of what we can see now. In the picture it looks like we are at the center of the universe, but that is not really true (as far as we know). It’s just that our visibility is limited, and we can only see so far away in any direction, that’s why it looks like a circle. There are different galaxies all over the place, ours is only one of many.