Harlow Shapley | |
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Born | November 2, 1885 Nashville, Missouri, U.S. |
Died | October 20, 1972 86) Boulder, Colorado, U.S. | (aged
Alma mater | University of Missouri, Princeton University |
Known for | Determining correct position of Sun within Milky Way Galaxy; head of Harvard College Observatory (1921–1952) |
Children | 5, including
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Awards |
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Scientific career | |
Fields | Astronomy |
Doctoral advisor | Henry Norris Russell |
Doctoral students | Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Carl Seyfert |
Other notable students | Georges Lemaître |
Harlow Shapley (November 2, 1885 – October 20, 1972) was an American scientist, head of the Harvard College Observatory (1921–1952), and political activist during the latter New Deal and Fair Deal. [1] [2]
Shapley used Cepheid variable stars to estimate the size of the Milky Way Galaxy and the Sun's position within it. [3] In 1953 he proposed his "liquid water belt" theory, now known as the concept of a habitable zone. [4]
Shapley was born on a farm five miles outside Nashville, Missouri, to Willis and Sarah (née Stowell) Shapley. [5] He went to school in Jasper, Missouri, but not beyond elementary school. [6] He worked as a journalist [7] after studying at home and covering crime stories as a newspaper reporter for the Daily Sun in Chanute, Kansas, and intermittently for the Times of Joplin, Missouri. [3] In Chanute, he found a Carnegie library and started reading and studying on his own. [3] Shapley returned to complete a six-year high school program in 1.5 years, graduating as class valedictorian. [3]
In 1907, Shapley went to the University of Missouri to study journalism. When he learned that the opening of the School of Journalism had been postponed for a year, he decided to study the first subject he came across in the course directory. Rejecting Archaeology, which Shapley later claimed he could not pronounce, he chose the next subject, Astronomy. [8]
After graduation, Shapley received a fellowship to Princeton University for graduate work, where he studied under Henry Norris Russell and used the period-luminosity relation for Cepheid variable stars (discovered by Henrietta Swan Leavitt) to determine distances to globular clusters. He was instrumental in moving astronomy away from the idea that Cepheids were spectroscopic binaries, and toward the concept that they were pulsators. [9]
He realized that the Milky Way Galaxy was far larger than previously believed, and that the Sun's place in the galaxy was in a nondescript location. This discovery supports the Copernican principle, according to which the Earth is not at the center of our Solar System, our galaxy, nor our Universe.
Shapley participated in the "Great Debate" with Heber D. Curtis on the nature of nebulae and galaxies and the size of the Universe. The debate took place on April 26, 1920, in the hall of the United States National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC. Shapley took the side that spiral nebulae (what are now called galaxies) are inside our Milky Way, while Curtis took the side that the spiral nebulae are "island universes" far outside our own Milky Way and comparable in size and nature to our own Milky Way. This issue and debate are the start of extragalactic astronomy, while the detailed arguments and data, often with ambiguities, appeared together in 1921. [10]
Characteristic issues were whether Adriaan van Maanen had measured rotation in a spiral nebula, the nature and luminosity of the exploding novae and supernovae seen in spiral galaxies, and the size of our own Milky Way. However, Shapley's actual talk and argument given during the Great Debate were completely different from the published paper. Historian Michael Hoskin says "His decision was to treat the National Academy of Sciences to an address so elementary that much of it was necessarily uncontroversial", with Shapley's motivation being only to impress a delegation from Harvard who were interviewing him for a possible offer as the next Director of Harvard College Observatory. [11] With the default by Shapley, Curtis won the debate. The astronomical issues were soon resolved in favor of Curtis' position when Edwin Hubble discovered Cepheid variable stars in the Andromeda Galaxy. [12] [13]
At the time of the debate, Shapley was working at the Mount Wilson Observatory, where he had been hired by George Ellery Hale. After the debate, however, he was hired to replace the recently deceased Edward Charles Pickering as director of the Harvard College Observatory (HCO).
He is also known to have opposed Edwin Hubble's observations that there are additional galaxies in the universe other than the Milky Way. Shapley fiercely critiqued Hubble and regarded his work as junk science. However, after he received a letter from Hubble showing Hubble's observed light curve of V1, a Cepheid variable star in the Andromeda galaxy, he withdrew his criticism. He reportedly told a colleague, "Here is the letter that destroyed my universe." He also encouraged Hubble to write a paper for a joint meeting of the American Astronomical Society and American Association for the Advancement of Science. [12] Hubble's findings went on to fundamentally reshape the scientific view of the universe. [13]
Despite having earlier argued strongly against the idea of galaxies other than our Milky Way, Shapley went on to make significant progress in the research of the distribution of galaxies, working between 1925 and 1932. In this time period, with the Harvard College Observatory, he worked to map 76,000 galaxies. One of the first astronomers to believe in the existence of galaxy superclusters, Shapley later discovered a large and distant example, which was later named the Shapley Supercluster. He estimated the distance to this supercluster at 231 Mpc, which is within 15% of the currently accepted value.[ citation needed ]
He served as director of the HCO from 1921 to 1952. During this time, he hired Cecilia Payne, who, in 1925, became the first person to earn a doctorate at Radcliffe College in the field of astronomy, for work done at Harvard College Observatory.
From 1941 he was on the original standing committee of the Foundation for the Study of Cycles. He also served on the board of trustees of Science Service, now known as Society for Science & the Public, from 1935 to 1971.[ citation needed ]
In the 1940s, Shapley helped found government funded scientific associations, including the National Science Foundation. He shares credit with British biochemist Joseph Needham for the addition of the "S" in UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization). [14] [15]
On November 14, 1946, Shapley appeared under subpoena by the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) in his role as member of the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts, Sciences and Professions (ICCASP), which HCUA described as a "major political arm of the Russophile left". It had opposed re-election of U.S. Representative Joseph William Martin Jr. during mid-term elections that year and was asked to answer questions about the ICCASP's Massachusetts' chapter. HCUA committee chairman John E. Rankin commented about Shapley's attitude, "I have never seen a witness treat a committee with more contempt" and considered contempt of Congress charges. Shapley accused HCUA of "Gestapo methods" and advocated for its abolition, saying that it had made "civic cowards of many citizens" by pursuing the "bogey of political radicalism." [2] [16]
A few weeks later, in early 1947, Shapley became president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). At the time, the AAAS's choice appeared to be a "rebuke" of HCUA and a positive championing of scientists. [2] In his inaugural address, Shapley referred to the danger of the "genius maniac" and proposed the elimination of "all primates that show any evidence or signs of genius or even talent". [17] Other global threats he listed were: drugs that suppressed the desire for sex; boredom; world war with weapons of mass destruction; a plague epidemic. [18]
In March 1949, Shapley chaired the Cultural and Scientific Conference for World Peace at the Waldorf-Astoria in New York. It was sponsored by the National Council of Arts, Sciences and Professions. Arch-conservative William F. Buckley, Jr., authored a 1951 book, God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of "Academic Freedom," wherein, in the eve of McCarthyism, he attacked liberalism at Yale and academia in general. In the book, Buckley cited Shapley's participation and averred that event was "Communist-inspired" and "Russian-dominated." [19]
In 1950, Shapley was instrumental in organizing a campaign in academia against Worlds in Collision by Russian expatriate psychiatrist Immanuel Velikovsky. Scientists generally considered this controversial US bestseller to be pseudoscience.
He was one of the signatories of the agreement to convene a convention for drafting a world constitution. [20] [21] As a result, for the first time in human history, a World Constituent Assembly convened to draft and adopt the Constitution for the Federation of Earth. [22]
Shapley married Martha Betz (1890–1981) in April 1914, whom he had met in Missouri. She assisted her husband in astronomical research both at Mount Wilson and at Harvard Observatory. She wrote numerous articles on eclipsing stars and other astronomical objects.
They had one daughter, editor and writer Mildred Shapley Matthews; and four sons. These included Lloyd Shapley, a mathematician and economist who won a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 2012, [2] and Willis Shapley, who became a Senior Executive Service leader at NASA. [23] His eldest granddaughter, June Lorraine Matthews, became a physicist.
Although Shapley was an agnostic, he was greatly interested in religion. [24] [25]
Shapley died in a nursing home in Boulder, Colorado on October 20, 1972, shortly before his 87th birthday. [2]
Named after him are:
Before the anti-communist phrase "Better Dead Than Red" became popular during McCarthyism in the 1950s, Shapley said in a 1947 speech entitled "Peace or Pieces" that "A slave world is not worth preserving. Better be lifeless like the cold moon, or primitively vegetal like desolate Mars, than be a planet populated by social robots." [2]
Shapley wrote many books on astronomy and the sciences. Among these was Source Book in Astronomy (New York: McGraw–Hill, 1929, co-written with Helen E. Howarth, also on the staff of the Harvard College Observatory), the first of the publisher's series of source books in the history of the sciences.
In 1953, he wrote the "Liquid Water Belt" which gave scientific credence to the ecosphere theory of Hubertus Strughold. [35]
In his 1957 book "Of Stars and Men", Shapley proposed the term Metagalaxies for what are now called superclusters.[ citation needed ]
Shapley attended Institute on Religion in an Age of Science conferences at Star Island and was the editor of the book Science Ponders Religion (1960). [36]
Edwin Powell Hubble was an American astronomer. He played a crucial role in establishing the fields of extragalactic astronomy and observational cosmology.
A galaxy is a system of stars, stellar remnants, interstellar gas, dust, and dark matter bound together by gravity. The word is derived from the Greek galaxias (γαλαξίας), literally 'milky', a reference to the Milky Way galaxy that contains the Solar System. Galaxies, averaging an estimated 100 million stars, range in size from dwarfs with less than a thousand stars, to the largest galaxies known – supergiants with one hundred trillion stars, each orbiting its galaxy's center of mass. Most of the mass in a typical galaxy is in the form of dark matter, with only a few percent of that mass visible in the form of stars and nebulae. Supermassive black holes are a common feature at the centres of galaxies.
The following is a timeline of galaxies, clusters of galaxies, and large-scale structure of the universe.
A Cepheid variable is a type of variable star that pulsates radially, varying in both diameter and temperature. It changes in brightness, with a well-defined stable period and amplitude. Cepheids are important cosmic benchmarks for scaling galactic and extragalactic distances; a strong direct relationship exists between a Cepheid variable's luminosity and its pulsation period.
The Magellanic Clouds are two irregular dwarf galaxies in the southern celestial hemisphere. Orbiting the Milky Way galaxy, these satellite galaxies are members of the Local Group. Because both show signs of a bar structure, they are often reclassified as Magellanic spiral galaxies.
The Local Supercluster is a formerly defined supercluster containing the Virgo Cluster and Local Group, which itself contains the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies, as well as others. At least 100 galaxy groups and clusters are located within its diameter of 33 megaparsecs. The Virgo SC is one of about 10 million superclusters in the observable universe and is in the Pisces–Cetus Supercluster Complex, a galaxy filament.
Wilhelm Heinrich Walter Baade was a German astronomer who worked in the United States from 1931 to 1959.
Henrietta Swan Leavitt was an American astronomer. Her discovery of how to effectively measure vast distances to remote galaxies led to a shift in the scale and understanding of the scale and the nature of the universe. Nomination of Leavitt for the Nobel Prize had to be halted because of her death.
Vesto Melvin Slipher was an American astronomer who performed the first measurements of radial velocities for galaxies. He was the first to discover that distant galaxies are redshifted, thus providing the first empirical basis for the expansion of the universe. He was also the first to relate these redshifts to velocity.
Heber Doust Curtis was an American astronomer. He participated in 11 expeditions for the study of solar eclipses, and, as an advocate and theorist that additional galaxies existed outside of the Milky Way, was involved in the 1920 Shapley–Curtis Debate concerning the size and galactic structure of the universe.
Adriaan van Maanen was a Dutch-American astronomer. Born in Friesland, he studied astronomy at the University of Utrecht, earning his Ph.D. in 1911, and worked briefly at the University of Groningen. In 1911, he came to the United States to work as a volunteer in an unpaid capacity at Yerkes Observatory. Within a year he got a position at the Mount Wilson Observatory, where he remained active until his death in 1946.
Allan Rex Sandage was an American astronomer. He was Staff Member Emeritus with the Carnegie Observatories in Pasadena, California. He determined the first reasonably accurate values for the Hubble constant and the age of the universe.
Henrietta Hill Swope was an American astronomer who studied variable stars. In particular, she measured the period-luminosity relation for Cepheid stars, which are bright variable stars whose periods of variability relate directly to their intrinsic luminosities. Their measured periods can therefore be related to their distances and used to measure the size of the Milky Way and distances to other galaxies.
The Great Debate, also called the Shapley–Curtis Debate, was held on 26 April 1920 at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, between the astronomers Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis. It concerned the nature of so-called spiral nebulae and the size of the Universe. Shapley believed that these nebulae were relatively small and lay within the outskirts of the Milky Way galaxy, while Curtis held that they were in fact independent galaxies, implying that they were exceedingly large and distant.
NGC 6822 is a barred irregular galaxy approximately 1.6 million light-years away in the constellation Sagittarius. Part of the Local Group of galaxies, it was discovered by E. E. Barnard in 1884, with a six-inch refractor telescope. It is the closest non-satellite galaxy to the Milky Way, but lies just outside its virial radius. It is similar in structure and composition to the Small Magellanic Cloud. It is about 7,000 light-years in diameter.
The Shapley Supercluster or Shapley Concentration is the largest concentration of galaxies in our nearby universe that forms a gravitationally interacting unit, thereby pulling itself together instead of expanding with the universe. It appears as a striking overdensity in the distribution of galaxies in the constellation of Centaurus. It is 650 million light-years away (z=0.046).
In astronomy, galactocentrism is the theory that the Milky Way Galaxy, home of Earth's Solar System, is at or near the center of the Universe.
The center of the Universe is a concept that lacks a coherent definition in modern astronomy; according to standard cosmological theories on the shape of the universe, it has no distinct spatial center.
Adelaide Ames was an American astronomer and research assistant at Harvard University. She was best known for her work on detailed surveys of the brightest extra-galactic spiral nebulae. She contributed to the study of galaxies with her co-authorship of A Survey of the External Galaxies Brighter Than the Thirteenth Magnitude, which was later known as the Shapley-Ames catalog. Ames was a member of the American Astronomical Society. She was a contemporary of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin and her closest friend at the observatory.
In astronomy, a period-luminosity relation is a relationship linking the luminosity of pulsating variable stars with their pulsation period. The best-known relation is the direct proportionality law holding for Classical Cepheid variables, sometimes called the Leavitt Law. Discovered in 1908 by Henrietta Swan Leavitt, the relation established Cepheids as foundational indicators of cosmic benchmarks for scaling galactic and extragalactic distances. The physical model explaining the Leavitt's law for classical cepheids is called kappa mechanism.
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: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link) OCLC 122262620(all editions).Shapley was not committed to any particular model of the expanding universe, but he did have strong opinions about the relationship between astronomy and religion. A confirmed agnostic, in the postwar period he often participated in science-religion discussions, and in 1960 he edited a major work on the subject – Science Ponders Religion.
Although a declared agnostic, Shapley was deeply interested in religion and was a genuinely 'religious' person from a philosophical point of view. 'I never go to church', he told Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, 'I am too religious.
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