HARLOW SHAPLEY understanding of the structure of the universe

HARLOW SHAPLEY FBI considered him a risk
A men are largely responsible for our current understanding of the structure of the universe and the solar system’s place in it. But to the FBI, Shapley was a dangerous character.

That’s in the massive file, too.
FBI agents recorded the addresses of every piece of mail that Shapley sent or received. Extraordinary surveillance was just part of the seven years of government spying on Shapley that ended in 1953, a year after he retired as Harvard College Observatory’s director.

The FBI even spied on the 1946 convention of the American Association of Variable Star Observers, which Shapley attended. He has an inherent dislike for authority, and will invariably do the opposite to what he is told or supposed to do.’” Shapley had made his reputation with one of the most monumental discoveries in astronomy since Copernicus’ displacement of the Earth. Using observations of Cepheid variable stars in globular clusters that he made at Mt. Wilson from 1914 to 1921, Shapley radically revised the scale of the Space estimated, after a few revisions, that the Sun and its planets were some 30,000 light years from the galaxy’s true center, which he correctly located in the direction of Sagittarius.

Daily Sun printed Shapley’s notes verbatim — coarse words and all. “Consequently [the politician] wanted to murder me and blow up everybody,” Shapley wrote.

He then won a fellowship to study with Henry Norris Russell, the country’s foremost astronomer, at Princeton. Under Russell, Shapley made his reputation for solving the orbits of binary star systems through the use of complex equations. That landed him a research job at Mt. Wilson, which began in 1914.

Using the 60- and 100-inch telescopes at the observatory north of Los Angeles, Shapley made his great discovery about the Milky Way Galaxy’s

In 1952, Shapley reached Harvard’s mandatory retirement stepped down from his post at the observatory. He had overseen massive projects produced by 25 large telescopes around the world, including the Shapley-Ames Catalog of External Galaxies. And the FBI continued to keep an eye on him

In February 1924 Edwin Hubble wrote to Shapley about his discovery of two Cepheid variables in the Andromeda nebula, M 31. Shapley responded that the letter was “the most entertaining literature I have seen for a long time,” and promised to send a revised period-luminosity curve. THE Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society has been awarded to Dr. Harlow Shapley for his studies of the structure and dimensions of the galactic system. Dr. Shapley, has been director of Harvard College Observatory and Paine professor of astronomy at Harvard since 1921, known particularly the relation between the period of variation and the absolute magnitude of Cepheid variable stars. The apparent magnitude of the Cepheid variables in a globular cluster is measured and compared with the known absolute magnitude of a Cepheid of the same period, and from this the distance of the cluster is obtained immediately, provided absorption of light in interstellar space is negligible. In 1915–18 he published a noteworthy series of papers on researches on the globular clusters which brought these objects prominently before astronomers.

That enabled astronomers to calculate a star’s distance from Earth, and in 1918 allowed Harlow Shapley, who would become Pickering’s successor, to extend the boundaries of the Milky Way.
NatureNov 22, 2016

Just before World War I, Harlow Shapley of Missouri devised a technique for measuring the distances to the globular clusters, those lovely spherical arrays of stars which resemble a swarm of bees.
Cosmos

Harlow Shapley, who wrote an article in 1919 on the subject, was an astronomer, responsible for the detection of the redshift in distant nebulae and hence, indirectly, for our present concept of an expanding universe.
Scientific AmericanOct 20, 2013

The article traces its roots to 1929, when Harlow Shapley said, “We organic beings who call ourselves humans are made of the same stuff as the stars.”
New York TimesAug 12, 2013

In 1928, astronomer Harlow Shapley correctly concluded that the two stars were about equal in mass.
Scientific AmericanJun 14, 2011