A black and white photo of astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt. She is looking at the camera, wearing a white blouse with a high collar.

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1. Robert McNees (mcnees@mastodon.social)'s status on Monday, 01-Jan-2024 16:10:10 UTC Robert McNees

   in reply to

   This important property of Cepheid variable stars was discovered by astronomer Henrietta Swan Leavitt. It makes them “standard candles” (a term she coined) that we can reliably use for establishing distances to cosmologically nearby galaxies.

   Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s period-luminosity relationship for Cepheids is one of the first rungs on the “cosmic distance ladder,” the collection of methods used by astronomers to measure extragalactic distances.