California’s wildfires came worryingly close to burning down a treasured observatory. Sadly, fires aren’t the only threat to astronomy, writes Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

By Chanda Prescod-Weinstein
David McNew/Getty Images
AS A teenager, I read Dennis Overbye’s history of cosmology, Lonely Hearts of the Cosmos. I was fascinated by the stories of now-dead men clashing, sometimes angrily, over measurements of what we would come to call the Hubble-Lemaître constant, which measures the rate of expansion of space-time.
Georges Lemaître first connected this idea with astronomical observations in 1927, and Edwin Hubble published the idea in English along with substantive data to support it in 1929. To achieve this, Hubble used the 2.5-metre Hooker telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory, which was state-of-the-art equipment …