"The photographic plates from Peru that Leavitt was studying in Harvard covered two clouds of stars, known as the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds... During the course of her painstaking work, Leavitt noticed that the Cepheids in the Small Magellanic Cloud (SMC) showed an overall pattern of behaviour in which the brighter Cepheids... went through their cycle more slowly. The initial discovery was reported in 1908, and by 1912 Leavitt had enough data to pin down this period-luminosity relationship in a mathematical formula, established from her study of twenty-five Cepheids in the SMC. ...Leavitt found a clear mathematical relationship between the apparent brightness of a Cepheid in the SMC and its period... This could only mean that the absolute magnitudes of Cepheids are related to one another in the same way, since the distance effect is essentially the same for all of the Cepheids in the SMC. All that was needed now was to find the distance to just one or two Cepheids in our neighborhood... so that distances... could be worked out from the period-luminosity law that Leavitt had discovered."
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Harvard University alumniWomen scientists from the United StatesAstronomers from the United StatesHarvard University staffScientists from Massachusetts
Original Language: English
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Sources
John Gribbin, The Scientists: A History of Scient told through the Lives of its Greatest Inventors (2002)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henrietta_Swan_Leavitt
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Henrietta Swan Leavitt
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