Physics & astronomy · 1929

A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae

Edwin Hubble

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · Vol. 15, No. 3 · 15 March 1929

Finds a roughly linear relation between the distances of extra-galactic nebulae and their radial velocities.

Poster of “A Relation between Distance and Radial Velocity among Extra-Galactic Nebulae”: the text in four columns
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License
Public domain
Retrieved
27 September 2026
Language
English
Rights holder
Edwin Hubble, 1929

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Edition

Page scans of the article in PubMed Central (pnas01016-0006.pdf, 600 ppi) and their OCR layer, corrected word by word, number by number, against the scans. The title, printed in italic capitals, is set in upper and lower case in the header, with the author line “By Edwin Hubble” (as “Edwin Hubble”), the affiliation and the date line “Communicated January 17, 1929”; the volume, issue and date of the kicker and the footer are those of the PubMed Central record. Page 168 opens with the end of another article, left out. Running heads and page numbers are dropped, words hyphenated at line ends are rejoined (the hyphens of “extra-galactic” and “velocity-distance”, which fall at line ends, belong to the words and are kept), and the superscript footnote numbers are footnote calls, the notes being listed at the end of the text. Tables 1 and 2 and the two solutions of page 170 are set as tables in the type of the poster, the equation of condition with KaTeX. Figure 1 is the file Edwin_Hubble_velocity-distance_relation_1929.png of Wikimedia Commons (1323 x 796 px, taken from the PNAS edition at https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.15.3.168), stored as 8-bit grayscale without its opaque alpha channel, every pixel unchanged; in the journal it interrupts the paragraph that starts “Secondly,” after “N. G. C. 404”, on the poster it comes just before that paragraph. Its number, title and caption are those printed under it.

Rights

Edwin Hubble died on 28 September 1953 (Wikidata, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q43027): his works are in the public domain in France since 1 January 2024. The article was published in the United States on 15 March 1929, before 1 January 1931: it is in the public domain there.

Figure 1: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Edwin_Hubble_velocity-distance_relation_1929.png, marked public domain on its Wikimedia Commons file page ({{PD-US-expired}} and {{PD-old-70}}), source https://www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10.1073/pnas.15.3.168. The PubMed Central scans, which the text was checked against, carry no license: PMC asks users to assume standard copyright unless stated otherwise, so no image is taken from them.

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