Hubble's law, also known as the Hubble–Lemaître law, is the observation in physical cosmology that galaxies are moving away from the Earth at speeds proportional to their distance. In other words, the farther they are the faster they are moving away from Earth. The velocity of the galaxies has been determined by their redshift, a shift of the light they emit toward the red end of the spectrum.
Hubble's law is considered the first observational basis for the expansion of the universe, and today it serves as one of the pieces of evidence most often cited in support of the Big Bang model.
The motion of astronomical objects due solely to this expansion is known as the Hubble flow. It is described by the equation v = H0D, with H0 the constant of proportionality—Hubble constant—between the "proper distance" D to a galaxy, which can change over time, unlike the comoving distance, and its speed of separation v, i.e. the derivative of proper distance with respect to cosmological time coordinate. (See "Uses of the proper distance" for some discussion of the subtleties of this definition of "velocity".)
Hubble constant is most frequently quoted in (km/s)/Mpc, thus giving the speed in km/s of a galaxy 1 megaparsec (3.09×1019 km) away, and its value is about 70 (km/s)/Mpc. However, the SI unit of H0 is simply s−1, and the SI unit for the reciprocal of H0 is simply the second. The reciprocal of H0 is known as the Hubble time. The Hubble constant can also be interpreted as the relative rate of expansion. In this form H0 = 7%/Gyr, meaning that at the current rate of expansion it takes a billion years for an unbound structure to grow by 7%.
Although widely attributed to Edwin Hubble, the notion of the universe expanding at a calculable rate was first derived from general relativity equations in 1922 by Alexander Friedmann. Friedmann published a set of equations, now known as the Friedmann equations, showing that the universe might expand, and presenting the expansion speed if that were the case. Then Georges Lemaître, in a 1927 article, independently derived that the universe might be expanding, observed the proportionality between recessional velocity of, and distance to, distant bodies, and suggested an estimated value for the proportionality constant; this constant, when Edwin Hubble confirmed the existence of cosmic expansion and determined a more accurate value for it two years later, came to be known by his name as the Hubble constant. Hubble inferred the recession velocity of the objects from their redshifts, many of which were earlier measured and related to velocity by Vesto Slipher in 1917. Though the Hubble constant H0 is roughly constant in the velocity-distance space at any given moment in time, the Hubble parameter H, which the Hubble constant is the current value of, varies with time, so the term constant is sometimes thought of as somewhat of a misnomer.