Abstract
Harlow Shapley (1885–1972) was born in Nashville, Missouri. He studied astronomy at the University of Missouri and did graduate work at Princeton University where he performed photometric measurements of eclipsing binary stars. Thereafter, he took a position as a regular observer at the Mount Wilson Observatory. His work on the distances of globular clusters, the Small Magellanic Cloud and the Milky Way led to a drastic revision of astronomers’ understanding of the size and structure of the Milky Way galaxy. The reading selection that follows was taken from a chapter of Shapley’s book entitled Galaxies. Herein, he describes a method for measuring astronomical distances using the period-luminosity relationship discovered by Henrietta Leavitt.
The procedure is very simple, once the period-luminosity relation is set up and accurately calibrated.
—Harlow Shapley
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Notes
- 1.
One astronomical unit (AU) is defined as the mean distance between the centers of Earth and the sun.
- 2.
One parsec is defined as the distance to an object which exhibits 1 arcsecond of parallax during Earth’s orbit around the sun.
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Kuehn, K. (2015). Measuring Astronomical Distances. 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_22
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4939-1360-2_22
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