The Hubble Space Telescope is named for astronomer @Edwin P. Hubble. As a young boy, Hubble read tales of traveling to undersea cities and journeying to the center of the Earth. These stories by adventure novelists stoked young Hubble's imagination of faraway places. He fulfilled those childhood dreams by becoming an astronomer, exploring distant galaxies with telescopes, and developing theories that changed the field of astronomy.
But Hubble didn't settle immediately on astronomy as a career. He first studied law as a @Rhodes @Scholar at Queens College in @Oxford, @England. A year after passing the bar exam, Hubble realized that his love of exploring the stars was greater than his attraction to law. He therefore abandoned law and studied astronomy at the University of @Chicago, where he completed his doctoral thesis in 1917.
Using the largest telescope of its day, Hubble looked far into space to study the @Andromeda nebula (which we now call the Andromeda Galaxy or @M31). With this powerful telescope, he saw stars near the edge of Andromeda, and he reasoned that Andromeda was a galaxy in its own right.
