Word: shapley
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Harlow Shapley, formerly of the Mount Wilson Solar Observatory at Pasadena, California, whose researches on the size and structure of the stellar universe have attracted widespread attention among astronomers, has been appointed Director of the College Observatory, and thus assumes a position which has been vacant since the death of Professor E. C. Pickering...
...Shapley is thirty-five years old. He was born at Nashville, Missouri, studied at the University of Missouri, received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Princeton, where he worked under Professor H. N. Russell, and from 1914 until last spring was attached to the Mount Wilson Observatory. During the past eight months he has been a member of the University staff with the title of Observer...
...structures of the great star-clusters. His work has given astronomers a new perception of the size of the stellar universe, showing that in volume it is at least a thousand times larger than it was thought to be before the distances to the clusters were measured. Furthermore, Dr. Shapley has discovered that the sun, instead of being at the center of the sidereal universe, as was formerly supposed, is really several hundred quadrillion miles away from...
...Shapley's studies of the famous star-cluster in Hercules known as "Messier 13" have proved that this cluster has a diameter of more than two and a half quadrillion miles, and contains probably more than fifty thousand stars, each of them intrinsically brighter than the sun. His researches have also played a large part in establishing the fact that the great star-clusters are found only at immense distances from the plane of the galaxy, or Milky Way, but appear to be falling into it. Dr. Shapley's hypothesis is that the Milky Way itself may be composed...
...appearance of life on the Earth led to the question: is there life on other planets? Life can only exist under favorable circumstances and is dependent upon temperature, atmospheric conditions, oxygen, and water. Dr. Shapley pointed out that if life does exist on other planets in our solar system, it must be of a very different nature...