Word: shapleys
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...mountain, Hubble encountered his greatest scientific rival, Harlow Shapley, who had already made his reputation by measuring the size of the Milky Way. Using bright stars called Cepheid variables as standardized light sources, he had gauged the galaxy as being an astounding 300,000 light-years across--10 times as big as anyone had thought. Yet Shapley claimed that the Milky Way was the whole cosmic ball of wax. The luminous nebulae were, he insisted, just what they looked like: clouds of glowing gas that were relatively nearby...
Hubble wasn't so sure. And in 1924, three years after Shapley departed to take over the Harvard Observatory, Hubble found proof to the contrary. Spotting a Cepheid variable star in the Andromeda nebula, Hubble used Shapley's technique to show that the nebula was nearly a million light-years away, far beyond the bounds of the Milky Way. It's now known to be the full-fledged galaxy closest to our own in a universe that contains tens of billions of galaxies. "I do not know," Shapley wrote Hubble in a letter quoted by biographer Christianson, "whether...
...American astronomer Harlow Shapley describes the size and structure of the Milky Way galaxy...
...worry that the Holmes proposal will put an end to the two things I love most about Central Square--its affordability and diversity," said MIT graduate student Nina Shapley...
...Jobe G. Danganan '99 844 852 861 879 915 1,071 1,150 Michael J. Bush '99 507 518 539 557 588 614 Benjamin W. Hulse '99 326 327 329 342 355 David J. Malan '99 169 174 189 197 Dorian S. Berger '00 109 116 127 Stuart D. Shapley '99 93 98 Cabot Henderson...