Word: globularity
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...Speed, intuition, excitement: that is my method of creation." Thus natty George Mathieu. 36, French "action painter," describes the process behind the globular, pyrotechnic displays that have earned him a reputation as one of the zaniest, smartest abstractionists in Paris...
...they use to measure the enormous distances between the galaxies. It is based on Cepheid variable stars, whose luminosity (and therefore whose distance) can be told from their periods of pulsation. The system worked all right for a while, but recently many contradictions have shown up. For instance, the globular star clusters in the Magellanic Clouds (small, comparatively nearby galaxies) seemed to be much fainter intrinsically than similar clusters in the Milky Way. This offended the astronomers' sense of order. They felt that the clusters in both galaxies should be about equally bright. When clusters in the great Andromeda...
...Shapley was especially concerned since he had much to do with setting up the Cepheids as reliable measuring sticks. After long consultations with other astronomers, he decided that the size of the whole universe must be doubled. If the remote galaxies are considered twice as far away, then their globular clusters will have about the proper intrinsic brightness. The galaxies will also be twice as big, reducing the Milky Way to an ordinary specimen...
Shapley bases his conclusion chiefly on observations of the globular clusters found within the Magellanic Clouds, companion galaxies to the Milky Way. His scale resolves discrepancies in the brightness of the clusters which had long been a source of difficulty to astronomers...
...Harvard Observatory has dipped into many qualitative astronomical problems. It is known for research on solar phenomena, the galaxies and nebulae, the Milky Way, meteors and comets, stellar spectra, variable star astronomy, and globular clusters, and it specializen in astrophysics, the science that deals with the constitution of the stellar bodies...