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By Root 490 0

” The Hubbles had just bought an acre lot in San Marino to build their charming new home (designed in the style of a small Tuscan villa) and used the funds to help pay for pruning the live oaks on their property and clearing out the deadwood—a needed renovation for appreciating the fine view of Mount Wilson and the San Gabriel Mountains from their backyard. There at his home Hubble began collecting old books, specifically on the Renaissance years, when the old Aristotelian representations of the universe were crumbling. “If an old scrap of paper, published within the sacred period, contains the names of Copernicus, or Tycho Brahe, or Kepler, or Galileo, [Hubble] hankers after that paper more than a debutante hankers after orchids,” wrote a local reporter. It was an apt hobby for the man who erected his own new-and-improved model of the cosmos.

Why was Hubble able to accomplish this magnificent feat while others were not? In actuality, there were several opportunities to resolve the island-universe controversy earlier. The Cepheids could have been hunted down and observed without the 100-inch telescope. It's somewhat surprising that more astronomers didn't sense the celestial riches to be found in distant space, just ready for mining. Having access to the world's largest telescope was not the essential key to Hubble's success (although it certainly helped). Mount Wilson's 60-inch telescope, erected in 1908, could have done the job just fine. Even the Crossley telescope at Lick had an outside chance. But few were interested in this area of endeavor, and those who did had bad luck. For example, the first person to find a variable star in a spiral nebula was not Hubble at all, but rather Wellesley College astronomer John Duncan. In 1920, while using Mount Wilson's 60-and 100-inch telescopes to search for novae, Duncan found three variable stars within the Triangulum nebula, M33. Over the next two years, he took additional images and also checked other photographs of the region made at the Yerkes, Lick, Lowell, and Mount Wilson observatories from 1899 to 1922 in an attempt to track the variables' periods but was unsuccessful. The data were simply too sparse at the time. And in his report of the find, Duncan refrained from directly linking the variables to the nebula. If he had followed up, the prize would have been his: The faintest variable he saw was later found to be a Cepheid and could have been used to peg the nebula's distance. Why didn't Shapley himself, the world's Cepheid guru, search for these special stars in the spiral nebulae and garner one of the choicest discoveries in astronomical history? It seemed like it would have been a natural progression for him. But around 1910 his colleague at Mount Wilson, George Ritchey, had photographed thousands of “soft star-like condensations” in Andromeda and other spirals, which he figured were nebulous stars in the process of formation. This interpretation suggested that a spiral nebula was simply the early stage of a modest star cluster forming, rather than an entire galaxy. Shapley admitted he was deeply influenced by Ritchey's images at the time, as were many others. Years later, in his autobiography, Shapley also suggested that strict divisions were in place in Mount Wilson as well: Shapley was relegated to the globular clusters and Hubble to the spiraling nebulae. Moreover, his taking the Harvard Observatory directorship distanced him from the thick of the battle.

But in truth, Shapley had basically taken off his scientist's hat and become too wedded to his vision of the Milky Way as the defining feature of the universe. He ignored conflicting data longer than he should have, which kept him from extending his work to the spiral nebulae and beating Hubble to the punch. He saw no reason to search for Cepheids in spiral nebulae, since he had already convinced himself that they were not separate galaxies. He was enormously attached to his Big Galaxy concept and had built his career on it. It's not surprising that he would be reluctant to let his vision be supplanted.

Shapley,