Word: shapleys
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Serene in sidereal time, above earth's battles, the astronomers of the world's belligerent nations have been communicating with each other regularly throughout World War II. This little-known fact was quietly revealed last week by famed Astronomer Harlow Shapley. His Harvard Observatory has served as the cosmic clearinghouse...
...most professional astronomers have been too busy for stargazing. Some 80% of them, including most of Professor Shapley's staff at Harvard, have been drafted for work in ballistics, rockets and other wartime projects. But in Europe, notably in Germany and Russia, astronomers have been allowed to stay at their telescopes. At the height of the German military tide, a Russian astronomer in the Caucasus electrified Muscovites with the news, radioed across enemy lines, that he had found a new nova...
Astronomers whose countries are at war with each other have kept in touch through neutrals-and through Professor Shapley, who has collected and distributed astronomical news in a mimeographed Monthly Astronomical Newsletter, edited by crack Harvard Astronomer Bart J. Bok. Shapley also has a well-organized worldwide system for telegraph reporting of spot news; Germans cable their discoveries to Harvard via Denmark and Sweden...
...Shapley further observed that spiral galaxies (especially the Milky Way) have many unstable, relatively short-lived supergiant stars, another sign of immaturity. Because spherical galaxies, on the other hand, have a smooth, stable structure with few star clusters and no supergiants, he concluded that a galaxy evolves from a spiral to a ball, not vice versa...
...Shapley crisply offered this rebuttal to Sir James in a lecture at Philadelphia's Franklin Institute, which this week awarded him its famed Franklin Medal for his galactic researches...