Related papers: Slipher, galaxies, and cosmological velocity field…

Vesto Melvin Slipher was the first astronomer to clearly define the factors that determine the "speed" of a nebular spectrograph. This brief historical summary recounts the way these ideas developed and how Slipher's early work on galaxy…

A brief history of the discovery of the expanding universe is presented, with an emphasis on the seminal contribution of VM Slipher. It is suggested that the well-known Hubble graph of 1929 could also be known as the Hubble-Slipher graph.…

Priority in the discovery of the velocity-distance relationship may be shifting from Edwin Hubble to Georges Lemaitre, but any reassessment of credit must also consider the contributions of Vesto Slipher. Not only were his spiral galaxy…

Of the first two relativistiv world models, only the one by de Sitter predicted redshifted spectra from far away astronomical objects. Slipher's redshifts therefore seemed to arbitrate against Einstein's model which made no such…

Recent analyses of Cepheid distances to spiral galaxies have led to an announcement of a Hubble constant of $H_0 = 72 \pm 8$ km/sec/Mpc. The new Cepheid distances, however, show that there are numerous redshift distances with large excesses…

Recently much attention has been paid to the discovery of Hubble's law: the linear relation between the rate of recession of the distant galaxies and distance to them. Though we now mention several names associated with this law instead of…

In the year 1924, a paper by Carl Wirtz appeared in Astronomische Nachrichten, entitled 'De Sitter's cosmology and the radial motion of spiral galaxies'. This paper and its author remained largely unnoticed by the community, but it seems to…

In cosmography, cosmokinetics, and cosmology it is quite common to encounter physical quantities expanded as a Taylor series in the cosmological redshift z. Perhaps the most well-known exemplar of this phenomenon is the Hubble relation…

For 100 years since galaxies were found to be flying apart from each other, astronomers have been trying to determine how fast. The expansion, characterized by the Hubble constant, H0, is confused locally by peculiar velocities caused by…

The meaning of "linear expansion" is explained. Particularly accurate relative distances are compiled and homogenized a) for 246 SNe Ia and 35 clusters with v<30,000 km/s, and b) for relatively nearby galaxies with 176 TRGB and 30 Cepheid…

Any calibration of the present value of the Hubble constant requires recession velocities and distances of galaxies. While the conversion of observed velocities into true recession velocities has only a small effect on the result, the…

Recently E. Harrison has argued the Red Shift distance law proposed by Hubble and velocity-distance law developed later on theoretical grounds has no general proof demonstrating the two laws are actually equivalent. It is the purpose of…

Redshift observations of galaxies outside the Local Group are fairly common in extragalactic astrophysics. If redshifts are interpreted as arising from radial velocities, these must be corrected by the contamination of the solar motion. We…

Henry Norris Russell, one of the most influential American astronomers of the first half of the 20th Century, had a special place in his heart for the Lowell Observatory. Although privately critical of the founder for his pronouncements…

We analyse the possibility that our Universe could be described by the model recently proposed by Melia & Shevchuk (2012), where the Hubble scale R_h=c/H is at all times equal to the distance ct that light has travelled since the Big Bang.…

Hubble's Law, v=HD (recession velocity is proportional to distance), is a theoretical result derived from the Friedmann-Robertson-Walker metric. v=HD applies at least as far as the particle horizon and in principle for all distances. Thus,…

The use of Type Ia supernovae as distance indicators led to the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the universe a decade ago. Now that large second generation surveys have significantly increased the size and quality of the…

Significant progress has been made during the last 10 years toward resolving the debate over the expansion rate of the Universe. The current value of the Hubble parameter, Ho, is now arguably known with an accuracy of 10%, largely due to…

Measuring the rate at which the universe expands at a given time -- the 'Hubble constant' -- has been a topic of controversy since the first measure of its expansion by Edwin Hubble in the 1920's. As early as the 1970's, Sandage et de…

After a brief introduction to the sixteenth and seventeenth century views of the Universe and the nineteenth century paradox of Olbers, we start the history of the cosmic expansion with Hubble's epochal discovery of the recession velocities…