Abstract
Henrietta Leavitt (1888–1921) was born in Lancaster, Massachusetts. After attending Oberlin College and graduating from Radcliff College, she took a position at the Harvard College Observatory. There, she worked under Edward Pickering analyzing the brightness of stars appearing on the observatory’s photographic plates. In so doing, she discovered the relationship between the luminosity and the period of oscillation of Cepheid variables located in the Magellanic Clouds. The reading that follows, which describes Leavitt’s observations, was published in the 1912 Harvard College Observatory Circular.
A remarkable relation between the brightness of these variables and the length of their periods will be noticed.
—Henrietta Leavitt
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Notes
- 1.
See the discussion of Henry Cavendish’s famous torsion balance experiment in Ex. 27.4 of volume II.
- 2.
See, for instance, the detailed discussion of astronomical and civil calendar conventions in Chap. 18 of Herschel, J. F. W., Outlines of Astronomy, Longmans, Green, and Co., 1893.
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Kuehn, K. (2015). The Luminosity of Variable Stars. In: A Student's Guide Through the Great Physics Texts. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1360-2_20
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1360-2_20
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