Abstract
During the final decade of the nineteenth century, Edward C. Pickering (1846–1919), the director of the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, recruited a staff of young women for a number of routine observatory tasks. He gave one of them—Williamina P. Fleming (1857–1911)—a tedious but extremely important assignment: searching through and classifying hundreds of thousands of tiny images of stellar spectra. As we shall see, Fleming discovered the next clue to the mysterious nature of Sirius B (Fig. 2.1).
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- 1.
Pannekoek (1989), p. 294.
- 2.
Ibid, p. 330.
- 3.
Holberg (2007), p. 86.
- 4.
Absolute temperature, in degrees Kelvin and abbreviated “K,” is measured from 0 at approximately −273 °C. See the Glossary in this book for additional information.
- 5.
One Ångstrom unit, abbreviated “Å,” is ten billionths of a cm, or 10−8 cm.
- 6.
“Proper motion” is the apparent distance that a star moves across the sky in 1 year. A star with a large proper motion is generally nearer to Earth than one with a small proper motion. See the Glossary in this book for additional information.
- 7.
Holberg (2007), p. 114.
- 8.
Eddington (1926), p. 171.
References
Eddington, A. S. (1926). The Internal Constitution of the Stars. Cambridge University Press: Cambridge.
Holberg, J. B. (2007). Sirius: Brightest Diamond in the Night Sky. New York: Springer.
Pannekoek, A. (1989). A History of Astronomy. Dover Publications, Inc.: New York.
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Van Horn, H.M. (2015). A Star the Size of the Earth? Absurd!. In: Unlocking the Secrets of White Dwarf Stars. Astronomers' Universe. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09369-7_2
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