Henrietta Leavitt Inventor of the cosmic yardstick. (Courtesy of Harvard College Observatory) While theorists developed this hypothesis, it was up to the observational astronomers to test the theory against reality. Unfortunately, they were having serious problems with measuring reality. Even measuring distances across the universe had proved problematic. In particular, nobody could measure the distances to the galaxies. Henrietta Leavitt was the woman who rescued the situation. Working as a ‘computer’ in the days when few women could pursue a career in science, she was employed to measure and analyse photographs of the stars in painstaking detail. Max Synthesizer.

With a great leap of intuition, she showed that Cepheid variable stars, which vary periodically in brightness, could be used to measure distances across the universe. She realised that the rate of variation of a Cepheid star gave a strong indication of its actual brightness, which could then be compared with its apparent brightness as seen from Earth, which then indicated the distance to the star. When Cepheid variable stars were found in distant galaxies, it became possible to measure the distance to the galaxies. Download Alkitab Bahasa Indonesia Easy Worship 2009. Herman, Gamow and Alpher, who predicted an echo from the Big Bang.