Word: shapleys
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Senator Taft then brought up Harlow Shapley, Paine Professor of Practical Astronomy, who, Taft said, has "attended every Communist meeting, important meeting, that we had in this country" and "joined every Communist front...
...expected that world-renowned astronomer Harlow Shapley will be cited by McCarthy as evidence of Conant's laxity in keeping faculty members with questionable political affiliations on the Harvard faculty. Shapley was prominent in Henry Wallace's Progressive party, and has been associated with organizations considered subversive by the government...
Last week, at an Amherst, Mass, meeting of the American Astronomical Society, Harvard's famed Astronomer Harlow Shapley demoted the Milky Way. It is a big galaxy, he said, but no bigger than many others...
...Shapley explained that astronomers have long had doubts about the yardstick 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...
...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...