“Thanks to Henrietta Leavitt”
[9/30/2008]
The CfA is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the discovery of the Cepheid period-luminosity relation on Nov 6, 2008. See http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/events/2008/leavitt/ for details.
[Update 10/03] For a nice introduction to the story of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, listen to this Perimeter Institute talk by George Johnson: http://pirsa.org/06050003/
[Update 11/06] The full program is now available. The symposium begins at Noon today.
hlee:
Hubble’s discovery, farther galaxies recess faster, is accentuated by simple linear regression or least square fitting. I wonder if her discovery of the P-L (period vs luminosity) relationship (brighter Cepheid stars tend to have longer period) received the same statistical attention. I wonder how statistics was prevailed in astronomy 100 years ago.
09-30-2008, 10:17 pm