Robert McNees
Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard Observatory, wrote back to inform Mittag-Leffler that Henrietta had passed away.
But, he pointed out, didn’t HE really deserve the credit for interpreting her results? As far as I know, Mittag-Leffler ignored Shapely’s distasteful reply.
So no one received a Nobel for her revolutionary work. But it did factor into the Physics Prize in 2011, awarded to Perlmutter, Riess, and Schmidt for discovering the accelerating Hubble expansion of the Universe.
Robert McNees
Like her Harvard colleague Annie Jump Cannon, Henrietta Swan Leavitt was deaf – the result of an illness she suffered after graduating from college but before she began her astronomy work.
Image: Annie Jump Cannon and Henrietta Swan Leavitt, 1913 (Harvard University Library)
Robert McNees
Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s work allowed Harlow Shapley to conclude that our Sun is further from the Milky Way’s center than previously thought. Unfortunately, he gave her little credit.
The same was true for Edward Pickering, who published many of her findings under his own name.
Robert McNees
Happy birthday to Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who gave us the means to measure our Universe.
Without her discovery there would be one fewer rung on the Cosmic Distance Ladder!
Image: Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics
Robert McNees
And it was central to the distance-redshift result proposed by Hubble and others (Robertson, Lemaître) before him, which eventually led to the conclusion that the Universe is expanding.
Robert McNees
Henrietta Swan Leavitt passed away in 1921, at the age of 53.
A few years later, the Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler, unaware that she had passed, wrote her a letter praising her accomplishments. It read:
“Honoured Miss Leavitt, your admirable discovery ... has impressed me so deeply that I feel seriously inclined to nominate you to the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1926.”
Robert McNees
Henrietta Swan Leavitt’s period-luminosity relation for Cepheid variable stars allowed Edwin Hubble (building on work by Vesto Slipher, and relying on contributions by others) to establish that so-called “spiral nebulae” were in fact separate galaxies outside our Milky Way.
Robert McNees
Cepheid variables were our first standard candles - phenomena that allow us to reliably determine galactic and extragalactic distances.
These stars brighten and dim with a regular period that correlates with their maximum brightness. Measure the former and you know the latter. Compare that brightness, inferred from period, with how bright they appear to be, and you how far away they are.
Basically, a light bulb looks dimmer from further away. Quantify that and you can judge the distance.
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