Word: cepheids
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...Cepheid variable stars, whose fluctuating light beams enable measurement of great interstellar distances, may prove also to hold important new clues to forces at work within the great island universes, or galaxies like our own Milky Way, Harlow Shapley, Director of the Observatory, recently told the National Academy of Sciences...
Star photographs made at the Harvard astronomy station in South Africa reveal an unusual distribution of Cepheid variable stars in the Small Magellanic Cloud, neighbor star system of the Milky Way. There is a "peculiar concentration" of the larger, longer-period Cepheid variable stars in regions where the star population is dense, Shapley said. Cepheids fluctuate in brightness in periods ranging from a few hours to about fifty days; their mass is four to five times that...
...meeting of the International Astronomical Union in Stockholm last week, Dr. Shapley reported on 2,000 Cepheid variables (giant stars which fluctuate regularly in brightness) at considerable distances from the Milky Way's central plane. These have the effect of stretching the galaxy's "vertical" diameter to about 80,000 light-years.** The diameter across the disk is put at 100,000 lightyears. Thus, the flattish lens of the Milky Way is enclosed in a globe of stars, and the galaxy's total shape resembles a pumpkin...
About 300 stars in the sky are known as Cepheid variables. Some internal pulse causes them to vary in brightness, in cycles of a few days or a few weeks. Most of them are hot, yellow, supergiants. Harlow Shapley at Mount Wilson worked out a relation between their luminosities and variation periods which yielded clues to shape and dimensions of the whole Milky Way (TIME, July 29, 1935). Last week Dr. Shapley, now director of Harvard Observatory, described the first known star to become a Cepheid while under observation. Ten years ago it began to pulse every two weeks...
...years ago this prize was awarded to Einstein, and five years ago to Eddington. The present reward was made in recognition of Dr. Shapley's general researches in astronomy, probably mainly because of his cosmogony contributions, galactic measurements, and studies of Cepheid variables, subjects in which the French themselves have taken considerable interest...