174 Hubble’s Law

The appearance of Hubble’s Law was not without controversy, either. Two years prior to Hubble’s formulation, Georges Lemaître , a Belgian Catholic priest, published a paper in the journalAnnales de la Société Scientifique de Bruxelles , which detailed the relationship between distance and velocity, supporting an expanding Universe Model. Lemaître earned his doctorate in Astronomy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, MIT, under the direction of Dr. Harlow Shapley.

It appeared, however, that astronomers wanted to acknowledge Hubble’s work instead of Lemaître. This might have been due to the fact that Lemaître’s doctorate advisor, Harlow Shapley, strongly opposed Hubble’s earlier extragalactic objects research and findings.