Edwin Hubble, the American astronomer, was born
#OnThisDay in 1889. Hubble discovered that many objects beyond the Milky Way previously classified as nebulae were actually galaxies, and his eponymous law describes tells us that a galaxy's velocity away from the observer is directly proportional to its distance. The Hubble Space Telescope is named in his honour, and below is one of its most famous images, the Pillars of Creation.