Harlow Shapley
Harlow Shapley (born November 2, 1885 in Nashville, Missouri, † October 20, 1972 in Boulder , Colorado ) was an American astronomer .
Live and act
In 1913 Harlow Shapley received his PhD from Princeton University under Henry Norris Russell with the work The Orbits of Eighty-Seven Eclipsing Binaries, A Summary . From 1914 he worked at the Mount Wilson Observatory , from 1921 to 1952 he was director of the Harvard College Observatory .
Shapley first determined the size of the Milky Way by studying variable Cepheid- type stars in globular clusters .
In 1915 he formulated the “Big Galaxy Hypothesis”, according to which the Milky Way is the only galaxy in the universe and the galaxies known up to that point (or “nebulae” as it was used at the time) lie within the Milky Way. The antithesis, the "world island theory", according to which the Milky Way is only one of many galaxies, was formulated by Heber Doust Curtis . This controversy is referred to in astronomy as the " great debate " and was decided around 1923 by Edwin Hubble in favor of the world island theory.
Shapley assumed a faulty normalization of the period-luminosity relationship of Cepheids, which led him to far overestimate the size of the Milky Way (300,000 light years instead of 100,000 light years). Furthermore, he was not aware of the age differentiation of the star populations , so that he underestimated the distance to the Small Magellanic Cloud and the Andromeda Nebula. The Danish astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung made the first normalizations of the period-luminosity relationship .
Shapley also carried out studies of galaxy clusters and distance measurements from stars using photometry .
He is the father of the Nobel Prize in Economics, Lloyd S. Shapley .
Honors
- 1920 member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- 1922 member of the American Philosophical Society
- 1924 member of the National Academy of Sciences
- 1933 Jules Janssen Prize
- 1934 Gold Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society
- 1939 Bruce Medal
- 1946 corresponding member of the Académie des sciences
- 1950 Henry Norris Russell Lectureship
- The asteroid (1123) Shapleya , a lunar crater and the supercluster SCl 124 are named after Shapley .
literature
- Harlow Shapley: Galaxies. Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge 1972, ISBN 0-674-34051-5
- Harlow Shapley: We children of the Milky Way - evolution from the depths of the cosmos. Econ-Verl., Düsseldorf 1965
- Harlow Shapley: Of stars and men - the human response to an expanding universe. Elek Books, London 1958
- Harlow Shapley: Climatic change - evidence, causes, and effects. Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge 1953
- Harlow Shapley: The inner metagalaxy. Oxford Univ. Press, London 1957
Web links
- Publications by H. Shapley in the Astrophysics Data System
- Obituaries for H. Shapley in the Astrophysics Data System
- The Bruce Medalists - Biography
- Oral History Transcript - Dr. Harlow Shapley Interview, 1966, aip.org (accessed December 1, 2015)
- Papers of Harlow Shapley, 1906–1966: an inventory Online Archival Search Information System @ Harvard University Library (accessed May 6, 2010)
- D. Hoffleit: The Selector of Highlights: A Brief Biographical Sketch of Harlow Shapley. The Journal of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, vol. 21, no. 2, pp. 151-156
Individual evidence
- ↑ Harlow Shapley Mathematics Genealogy Project (accessed May 5, 2010)
- ^ List of members since 1666: Letter S. Académie des sciences, accessed on March 1, 2020 (French).
- ^ The Shapley Supercluster - the Largest Matter Concentration in the Local Universe eso.org, pdf, accessed February 20, 2011
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Shapley, Harlow |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | American astronomer |
| DATE OF BIRTH | November 2, 1885 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Nashville , Tennessee |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 20, 1972 |
| Place of death | Boulder, Colorado |