Word: shapley
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Flagstaff, Arizona, March 15--Among the numerous suggestions for a name for the new planet which have been received here is that of Dr. Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard Observatory, who offers "Kronos", appellation of the mythological father of the six principal Greek gods. R. L. Putnam has suggested "Constance" in honor of the discoverer's widow, a name connoting the firmness of Dr. Lowell's conviction that the planet existed. Other choices being considered are "Percival" and "Atlas...
Both these papers, Shapley's and Lundmark's, are of vast importance in a reorganization of our idea of the extent of space, fixing a limit of which is as yet beyond human comprehension, according to Lundmark, who reports that the spiral nebulae which he has been examining are by no means the farthest objects from earth in the universe...
...earth and the planets went around the sun. In 1902, a man named Kapteyn put forth the theory that the sun was the center of things and that the stars were scattered about it. This Kapteyn Universe, as it was called, was in good standing till 1917 when Dr. Shapley found that we were not the center of things after...
...them were on one side of us. This led him to believe that we were not the center of the universe, but that we were, on the contrary, off center, and that the Milky Way was so full of stars because we were looking through the center. So the Shapley system, or the galactic system, as it is called, held that we were one of countless stars which go to form a system much in the shape of a giant millstone. Determining the thickest part of the Milky Way, Dr. Shapley then determined that the star Sagiltarins was the approximate...
...Shapley's most recent research has been concerned with variable stars in the large Magellanic cloud. This cloud seems to be another system rather like the one in which we are whirled about Sagittarius. Dr. Shapley has found, by examination of the Cepheids variables in this cloud that the light from certain ones waxes and wanes, the period which the change in brightness takes having a direct relation, through the average brightness, to the distance of the Cepheids from us. In this way he has calculated that the large Magellanic cloud is 86,000 light years away from...