![]() He paid the computers 25 cents per hour, about $1,500 per annum, while the men of the Observatory made at least $2,500 annually.Īside from Annie Jump Cannon, who joined the observatory the year after Leavitt, computers were not allowed to use the telescopes. "To attain the greatest efficiency, a skillful observer should never be obliged to spend time on what could be done equally well by an assistant at a much lower salary," Pickering wrote in the 1898 Annual Report of the Harvard Observatory. Indeed, when Pickering decided to pack his staff with women, this is what he had in mind. In these staff positions, women could apply their "feminine" skills without posing a threat to their male colleagues, in either prestige or pay. Positions like Leavitt's were typically low-paying and low-ranking, with little to no room for advancement. Men, meanwhile, were thought to be more oriented toward leadership and the intellectual work of observation and theory. ![]() In line with 19th-Century gender roles, women were seen as ideal candidates for this classification work, which required patience and attention to detail – qualities that women were thought to embody naturally. ![]() Leavitt was recruited by the director of the Harvard Observatory, Edward Pickering, who was leading a multi-decade project to photograph the entire night sky, and then classify and catalogue the spectra of its stars. They were still largely excluded from teaching at universities and leadership positions, but astronomy departments were only too happy to take them on to support their "big science" projects, which required large numbers of low-paid workers. At the time, a growing number of women like Leavitt were graduating with higher degrees, according to the historian Margaret Rossiter, who researched women’s roles in science at the turn of the 20th Century. “Our entire perception of the Universe completely changed as a result of her discovery,” says Wendy Freedman, an astronomer and astrophysicist at the University of Chicago.Īfter taking an interest in astronomy in her senior year, Leavitt got an apprenticeship at Harvard College Observatory in 1895, aged 27. Known as the period-luminosity relationship, Leavitt’s insights allowed astronomers to measure distance on an intergalactic scale and gave Hubble the formula he needed to see outside our neighbourhood and into the Universe beyond. ![]() And her hunt for stars led her to an even greater prize – the method for measuring distance through space. Leavitt, who was once described as a "variable star-fiend", discovered over 2,000 variable stars of her own. This group, all women, discovered dozens of new novae, nebulae, and asteroids, as well as thousands of "variable stars", which are defined by their waxing and waning brightness. Leavitt was one of many "human computers" working at the Harvard College Observatory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The woman who changed human fertility forever.The female physician who popularised the Pap smear.This is how Leavitt experienced the Universe. The black stars illuminated on the white surface reveal a reversal of the night sky viewed with the naked eye. One side of the glass plate was coated in photographic emulsion and dotted with the ghostly imprint of thousands of stars captured on its surface. Leavitt instead used a magnifying lens pointed – not up, but down – at a delicate glass plate fixed into a wooden frame. Hubble’s remarkable observation would not have been possible without the work of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, who did not even use a telescope. A spiral of a trillion stars, the Andromeda Galaxy churns about 2.5 million light years away from Earth. That changed in 1923 when astronomer Edwin Hubble sat at the peak of Mount Wilson in California and pointed the observatory’s telescope toward a fuzzy bright spiral in the distant night sky, the Andromeda Nebula.Īndromeda, Hubble observed, was too far away to be part of the Milky Way. Many astronomers were convinced that our home galaxy of the Milky Way made up the entirety of the cosmos. A century ago, the Universe seemed like a much smaller place.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |