James Webb Space Telescope

Critics of Webb claim that he was complicit in discrimination against gay and lesbian NASA employees during his tenure, pointing to incidents such as the 1963 "immoral conduct" firing of Clifford Norton.

Amateur historians and astronomers are buzzing with intrigue over allegations that the legendary US astronomer Edwin Hubble, after whom NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is named, may have actively censored the work of a competitor to advance his own career.

Professional historians are demanding further evidence, but advocates of the position are already urging NASA to name a future space mission after the slighted researcher.

Hubble is credited with a discovery that paved the way for modern astronomy. In 1929, he published a paper1 in which he reported on a correlation between the distance of galaxies from Earth and their velocities. Later dubbed Hubble's law, the correlation shows that the further away a galaxy is, the more its light shifts towards the red end of the spectrum. This redshift implies that galaxies are moving away from the Earth, and later astronomers interpreted it as evidence that the Universe seems to be expanding.

But Hubble was not the first to notice this correlation. In 1927, the Belgian astronomer Georges Lemaître published a paper in French, which gave a theoretical description of the same relationship2. Lemaître also used data from others to derive the constant governing the expansion, known today has Hubble's constant. "If you wanted to pick one person who probably deserves most credit for [discovering] the expanding Universe, it would be Lemaître," says Robert Smith, a historian of science at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada.