Chasing Galaxies - The Legacy of "Brian Tinsley's clever wife"

By the 1930s Edwin Hubble was well into his search for far-off galaxies. Using the great 100-inch telescope atop California’s Mount Wilson, he could see out to distances of a few hundreds of millions of light-years. But beyond that, the smudges on his photographic plates were dim, fuzzy, and next to impossible to identify. “There,” wrote Hubble in 1936, in his classic book The Realm of the Nebulae, “we measure shadows, and we search among ghostly errors of measurement for landmarks that are scarcely substantial.” Ever since, as­tronomers have struggled to trace the evolution of galaxies back through space-time—not just hundreds of millions of light-years outward, but billions...

Natural History Magazine.com