Quoting from the Encyclopedia Britannica ---------------------------------------------------- To cite this page: "Shapley, Harlow" Encyclop\146dia Britannica Online [Accessed March 11, 1999]. Copyright \051 1994-1999 Encyclop\146dia Britannica, Inc. --------------------------------------------------------- Shapley, Harlow b. Nov. 2, 1885, Nashville, Mo., U.S. d. Oct. 20, 1972, Boulder, Colo. American astronomer who deduced that the Sun lies near the central plane of the Galaxy some 30,000 light-years away from the centre. In 1911 Shapley, working with results given by Henry N. Russell, began finding the dimensions of stars in a number of binary systems from measurements of their light variation when they eclipse one another. These methods remained the standard procedure for more than 30 years. Shapley also showed that Cepheid variables cannot be star pairs that eclipse each other. He was the first to propose that they are pulsating stars. Shapley joined the staff of the Mount Wilson Observatory, Pasadena, Calif., in 1914. Employing the 1.5-metre (60-inch) reflecting telescope at Mount Wilson, he made a study of the distribution of the globular clusters in the Galaxy; these clusters are immense, densely packed groups of stars, some containing as many as 1,000,000 members. He found that of the 100 clusters known at the time, one-third lay within the boundary of the constellation Sagittarius. Utilizing the newly developed concept that variable stars accurately reveal their distance by their period of variation and apparent brightness, he found that the clusters were distributed roughly in a sphere whose centre lay in Sagittarius. Since the clusters assumed a spherical arrangement, it was logical to conclude that they would cluster around the centre of the Galaxy; from this conclusion and his other distance data Shapley deduced that the Sun lies at a distance of 50,000 light-years from the centre of the Galaxy; the number was later corrected to 30,000 light-years. Before Shapley, the Sun was believed to lie near the centre of the Galaxy. His work, which led to the first realistic estimate for the actual size of the Galaxy, thus was a milestone in galactic astronomy. In addition to his studies of the Galaxy, Shapley studied the neighbouring galaxies, especially the Magellanic Clouds, and found that galaxies tend to occur in clusters, which he called metagalaxies. Shapley became professor of astronomy at Harvard University, later director of Harvard College Observatory (1921-52), and was made director emeritus and Paine Professor of Astronomy at Harvard in 1952. His works include Star Clusters (1930), Flights from Chaos (1930), Galaxies (1943), The Inner Metagalaxy (1957), and Of Stars and Men ... (1958). Quoting from the Encyclopedia Britannica ---------------------------------------------------- To cite this page: "Cosmos" Encyclop\146dia Britannica Online [Accessed March 11, 1999]. Copyright \051 1994-1999 Encyclop\146dia Britannica, Inc. --------------------------------------------------------- Shapley's contributions: In 1917 the American astronomer Harlow Shapley mounted a serious challenge to the Kapteyn universe. Shapley's study of the distances of globular clusters led him to conclude that their distribution centred on a point that lay in the direction of the constellation Sagittarius and at a distance that he estimated to be about 45,000 light-years (50 percent larger than the modern value). Shapley was able to determine the distance to the globulars through the calibration of the intrinsic brightnesses of some variable stars found in them. (Knowing the period of the light variations allowed Shapley to infer the average intrinsic brightness. A measurement of the average apparent brightness then allowed, from the 1/r2 law of brightness, a deduction of the distance r.) According to Shapley, the galactic system was much larger than Kapteyn's estimate. Moreover, the Sun was located not at its centre but rather at its radial outskirts (though close to the midplane of a flattened disk). Shapley's dethronement of the Sun from the centre of the stellar system has often been compared with Copernicus' dethronement of the Earth from the centre of the planetary system, but its largest astronomical impact rested with the enormous physical dimensions ascribed to the Galaxy. In 1920 a debate was arranged between Shapley and Heber D. Curtis to discuss this issue before the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C. The debate also addressed a second controversy--the nature of the so-called spiral nebulas. Shapley and his adherents held that these objects were made up of diffuse gas and were therefore similar to the other gas clouds known within the confines of the Milky Way Galaxy. Curtis and others, by contrast, maintained that the spirals consisted of stars and were thus equivalent to independent galaxies coequal to the Galaxy. A parallel line of thought had been proposed earlier by the philosophers Immanuel Kant and Thomas Wright and by William Herschel. The renewed argument over the status of the spirals grew in part out of an important development that occurred around the turn of the 20th century: the astronomical incorporation of the methods of spectroscopy both to study the physical nature of celestial bodies and to obtain the component of their velocities along the line of sight. By analyzing the properties of spectral lines in the received light (e.g., seeing if the lines were produced by absorption or emission and if the lines were broad or narrow), or by analyzing the gross colours of the observed object, astronomers learned to distinguish between ordinary stars and gaseous nebulas existing in the regions between stars. By measuring the displacement in wavelength of the spectral lines with respect to their laboratory counterparts and assuming the displacement to arise from the Doppler effect, they could deduce the velocity of recession (or approach). The spirals posed interpretative difficulties on all counts: they had spectral properties that were unlike either local collections of stars or gaseous nebulas (because of the unforeseen roles of dust and different populations of stars in the arms, disk, and central bulge of a spiral galaxy); and, as had been shown by the American astronomer Vesto Slipher, they generally possessed recession velocities that were enormous compared to those then known for any other astronomical object. The formal debate between Shapley and Curtis ended inconclusively, but history has proved Shapley to be mostly right on the issue of the off-centre position of the solar system and the large scale of the Galaxy, and Curtis to be mostly right on the issue of the nature of the spirals as independent galaxies. As demonstrated in the work of the Swiss-born U.S. astronomer Robert J. Trumpler in 1930. Kapteyn (and Herschel) had been misled by the effects of the undiscovered but pervasive interstellar dust to think that the stars in the Milky Way thinned out with distance much more quickly than they actually do. The effect of interstellar dust was much less important for Shapley's studies because the globular clusters mostly lie well away from the plane of the Milky Way system.