Henrietta Swan Leavitt

Early Life
Miss Leavitt was born on July 4, 1868 in
Lancaster, Massachusetts
z She was one of seven children
z She grew up in a middle to upper middle
class neighborhood and had a live-in
servant
z She attended public school in Cambridge,
Massachusetts
z

College
z

1885 (she was 17) Henrietta

Leavitt enrolled at Oberlin
College
1888 she returned to
Cambridge and attended the
Society for the Collegiate
Instruction of Women (now
called Radcliffe College)
She took her first course in
astronomy as a senior and
received an A1892 earned a certificate
stating she had completed a
curriculum equivalent to a
Bachelor of Arts at Harvard

The Observatory

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Henrietta Leavitt volunteered as a research

assistant at the Harvard College Observatory and
became a computer
The current head was Edward Pickering who
believed the main project of the Harvard
Observatory should be cataloging data for others
to theorize on
She worked on recording the magnitudes of stars,
specifically variable stars
After seven years she was offered a full time
position and was paid thirty cents an hour, five
cents more than usual

Her Conjecture
z
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Miss Leavitt was given the task of finding

variable stars in the Magellanic Clouds
In 1908 she published an account of her
findings, 1777 variable stars in the Magellanic
Clouds
At the end of the
report, she stated,
It is worthy of notice,
the brighter variables
have longer periods.

A Further Report
z

Leavitt wrote a formal report in the Harvard

Circular titled, Periods of 25 Variable Stars in
the Small Magellanic Cloud

A remarkable relation between

the brightness of these variables
and the lengths of their periods
will be noticedSince the
variables are probably at the
same distance from the Earth,
their periods are apparently
associated with their actual
emission of light, as determined
by their mass, density, and
surface brightness.

Standard Candles
z

Used to predict the intrinsic brightness of an object,

which can then be compared to the apparent brightness
of the object using the inverse square law
m = M 97.5 + 5xlog(D)

Cepheid Variable Stars

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Have periods from one to fifty days

The variability is caused by nuclear

pressure building within the stars core and
unbalancing gravity. The star expands until
it is no longer dense enough to maintain
the nuclear pressure and gravity causes it
to contract
The larger the star, the longer it takes to
expand and contract to these critical points

Later Projects
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Leavitt was assigned to finish the North

Polar Sequence: compare relative
brightness of stars, 96 stars from 4th to
21st magnitude.

Discovered four novae

z Died of cancer on
December 21, 1921
z

Obstacles
Leavitt had recurring illnesses that
prevented her from working for long
periods of time
z She was eventually completely deaf
z Pickering firmly believed that the
computers should stick to recording data
and discouraged theorizing
z

What it lead to
z

z
z

Harlow Shapley, the director of Harvard

Observatory after Pickering died, used the
Cepheid period-luminosity in determining the
distance to the galactic center
Used to show that many nebula are too distant
to be part of the Milky Way Galaxy
Edwin Hubble used the relation when
discovering the Hubble Law: that red shift is
proportional to distance

Awards and Societies

Phi Beta Kappa
z The American Association of University
Women
z The American Astronomical and
Astrophysical Society
z American Association for the
Advancement of Science
z honorary member of the American
Association of Variable Star Observers
z

Bibliography
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Byers, Nina & Williams, Gary (2006). Out of the

Shadows: Contributions of Twentieth-Century
Women to Physics. Cambridge University
Press.
Johnson, George (2005). Miss Leavitts
Stars. Atlas Books. New York.
http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/science/myste
ries_l1/cepheid.html
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~soper/MilkyWay/cephe
id.html