Cosmic Times
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Teachers' Guide to the 1929 Cosmic Times Articles

This poster is the second edition of the Cosmic Times, and the articles in this edition build on the concepts introduced in the 1919 edition. The headline story is that Edwin Hubble has discovered that the Universe is expanding. The idea of an expanding Universe is contrary to Einstein's assumption of a static Universe, and while Einstein was not convinced of the veracity of Hubble's results, the astronomical community generally accepted them. This discovery came on the heels of the discovery that the Milky Way is not the only galaxy in the Universe, which was determined in 1920, also by Hubble.

An intermediate discovery – that there were galaxies outside the Milky Way – is also introduced, and is important to Hubble's findings of an expanding Universe.

The language in the 1929 newpaper mimicks the style of writing that would have appeared in a real 1929 newspaper. The language and sentence structure may be a bit difficult for your students to read, so we have also provided a differentiated newsletter version of the text written in a more modern style and lower reading level. We have also provided a glossary, available in both in pdf and Word document formats, which is available on the the poster download page. The poster also shows a layout that mimicks the papers of the time, however, we have taken some creative license to make it more readable in a classroom setting. Real newspapers of the time would have had 5-7 narrow columns of small type.

Use the following links for further background on each of the articles in the 1929 Cosmic Times:

Cosmic Times is a product of the Imagine the Universe! website. Imagine the Universe is a service of the High Energy Astrophysics Science Archive Research Center (HEASARC), Dr. Alan Smale (Director), within the Astrophysics Science Division (ASD) at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center.

The Cosmic Times Team
Cosmic Times Project Leaders: Dr. Jim Lochner and Dr. Barbara Mattson
Curator:Meredith Gibb
Responsible NASA Official:Phil Newman
All material on this site has been created and updated between 2007-2008.
Last Updated: Tuesday, 22-Apr-2008 15:39:53 EDT