Ada Lovelace Day 2011: Henrietta Swan Leavitt
Ada Lovelace Day 2011: posted ten minutes early my time because I'll be busy tomorrow.
There is a connection between the horrible Cepheid bunny suit and Henrietta Swan Leavitt. Sort of. In that she was instrumental in discovering the relationship between period-luminosity of actual cepheid variables over a hundred years ago, and that discovery helped with all sorts of things later on, like establishing distance scales on a galactic/extragalactic scale.
I read up a little on her last year while trying to decide who to write about for Ada Lovelace Day 2010, and was naturally drawn to mentions of cepheid variables because... well, Cepheid. This year I dug a little further, looking for actual information and trying to figure out what her contributions actually were because while I think that space is awesome, I know very little about actual astronomy and the like because my brain is mostly cluttered with biology and Star Wars trivia.
What fascinated me most was that Henrietta Leavitt was part of a group that is linked on Wikipedia as the Harvard Computers, but was apparently referred to as "Pickering's Harem," after the director of the Harvard Observatory who employed them. (A harem. Great. Also, linked in the article: "The Harem Effect", where a male hires a group of women to be less threatening than men but get the same work done. So there's that.) These women, whose job it was to sort through data, made important discoveries. Henrietta Leavitt's astronomy-changing period-luminosity relationship discovery might have been the most important (that I've found; I could be wrong) but Williamena Fleming discovered the Horsehead Nebula while working there. (Did I mention Fleming was Pickering's maid? And that he hired her because he was ticked off at his male assistants?) Not bad for a bunch of underpaid women (they didn't even make as much as clerical staff) who weren't allowed to use the telescope.
But back to Leavitt. If it wasn't for her looking at a load of photographic plates (some 1,777 variable stars, according to Wikipedia) and figuring out the period-luminosity ratio of cepheid variable stars, Edwin Hubble might not have been able to make his discoveries--or at least it would have been much harder. Hubble later said that Leavitt should have gotten a Nobel prize, but she had died of cancer by the time paperwork had been prepared.
Oh, she wasn't in the best of health during her time working at Harvard. She was going deaf and frequently ill, but still named head of stellar photometry.
So what's her legacy? Other than the period-luminosity ratio, enabling others who came after her to leap off of that discovery (A quote from David H. Clark and Matthew D.H. Clark's Measuring the Cosmos: "If Henrietta Leavitt had provided the key to determine the size of the cosmos, then it was Edwin Powell Hubble who inserted it in the lock and provided the observations that allowed it to be turned."), an asteroid and a moon crater named after her?
Actually, that sounds like a pretty awesome legacy.
Also, there is a student organization at Texas A&M named after the type of star that she was instrumental in studying, if not discovering. And I might never have given her name a second glance if I hadn't been a part of it, because while Space Is Cool I'm a biology nerd. So thanks, Ada Lovelace Day, for giving me the opportunity to learn about someone I wouldn't have otherwise.