![]() In the early 1900s, women were not allowed to operate telescopes. It wasn't until her fourth year of college that Leavitt took a course in astronomy, in which she earned an A–.:27 Leavitt also began working as one of the women "computers" at the Harvard College Observatory, hired by its director Edward Charles Pickering to measure and catalog the brightness of stars as they appeared in the observatory's photographic plate collection. At Oberlin and Harvard, Leavitt studied a broad curriculum that included classical Greek, fine arts, philosophy, analytic geometry, and calculus. Leavitt attended Oberlin College before transferring to Harvard University's Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women later Radcliffe College, receiving a bachelor's degree in 1892. Leavitt remained deeply religious and faithful to her church. ![]() In the early Massachusetts records the family name was spelled "Levett". She was a descendant of Deacon John Leavitt, an English Puritan tailor, who settled in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the early seventeenth century. Henrietta Swan Leavitt was born in Lancaster, Massachusetts, the daughter of Congregational church minister George Roswell Leavitt and his wife Henrietta Swan Kendrick. Even further distances can be measured by using the theoretical maximum mass of white dwarfs calculated by Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. Our galaxy, the Milky Way, is already 100,000 light years big. The parallax and triangulation method works up to hundreds of light years, but not further. Before Leavitt noticed the relation between luminosity and the period which can be used for distances up to 20 million light years, astronomers relied on parallax and triangulation. After her death, Edwin Hubble used Leavitt's period-luminosity relation, together with the galactic spectral shifts first measured by Vesto Slipher at Lowell Observatory, in order to establish that the universe is expanding see Hubble's law. Leavitt's discovery provided astronomers with the first "standard candle" with which to measure the distance to faraway galaxies. This work led her to discover the relation between the luminosity and the period of Cepheid variables. A graduate of Radcliffe College, she worked at the Harvard College Observatory as a "computer", tasked with examining photographic plates in order to measure and catalog the brightness of stars. Henrietta Swan Leavitt was an American astronomer. A straight line can readily be drawn among each of the two series of points corresponding to the maxima and minima, thus showing that there is a simple relation between the brightness of the variables and their periods.
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