Edwin Hubble, a native of Marshfield born November 20, 1889, and died September 28, 1953, was the 20th century’s outstanding astronomer. In observations made in the 1920s and 1930s, he discovered the expansion of the universe. He opened the world of galaxies for science when he showed that spiral nebulae beyond the Milky Way are galaxies extending to the limit of the universe and participating in a general expansion of the cosmos. The exploding universe of Hubble, now termed the Big Bang, determined the origin of the elements, of galaxies and of the stars. Hubble spent some of his boyhood in Marshfield and is related to some residents of the area. His exploits in the world of science led to the launching of the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990, which is probing to the very edge of space.