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Cepheid. But Leavitt's going to a telescope to pursue an answer was out of the question, not only because women were denied access to the best telescopes at the time (generally considered man's work) but because of her frail condition. Given her deafness and frequent illnesses, she had been advised by her doctor to avoid the chilly night air, an environment habitually faced by observers. She came to believe the cold aggravated her hearing condition. If she had the know-how, she could have carried out a calculation from her desk, using stellar data from previously published work, but Pickering held the strong conviction that his observatory's prime function was to collect and classify data, rather than apply it to solve problems. The accumulation of facts was Pickering's prime directive, so he quickly assigned Leavitt another task, a project on stellar magnitudes that he considered far more important. She respectfully carried out her boss's directive without objection for a number of years. Back in her room at the observatory, she continued to work on the stars photographed by others. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who came to the Harvard Observatory in the 1920s, called this “a harsh decision, which condemned a brilliant scientist to uncongenial work, and probably set back the study of variable stars for several decades.” Yet Leavitt's effort was not wasted. In the end her delegated work served as the basis for an internationally accepted system of stellar magnitudes.

But her desire to pursue the variables never left her; it only awaited the proper time to act on it. Soon after Pickering's death, Leavitt at last divulged her most cherished interest to the observatory's new director, Harlow Shapley. Once he arrived at Harvard in 1920, she lost no time in asking his advice on advancing her research on the stars in the Magellanic Clouds. By then Shapley had already calibrated the Cepheids, but he told Leavitt he would like to see a deeper investigation of the short-period variables, stars that pulse over a matter of hours instead of many days. “[It's] of enormous importance in the present discussions of the distances of globular clusters and the size of the galactic system,” he said. Moreover, does the same period-luminosity law also work for stars in the Large Magellanic Cloud? he asked. He wished her success on tackling these questions.

But just as she was on the verge of completing her prolonged stellar magnitude project—possibly when she would have at last gone back to her work on the Cepheids—Henrietta Leavitt passed away at the age of fifty-three. She had faced a long and grueling struggle with stomach cancer. By the time of her death, on December 12, 1921, she had discovered some twenty-four hundred variable stars, about half the number then known to exist. Her contributions at Harvard had been unique, making it difficult for them to replace her. “Miss Leavitt had no understudy competent to take up her work,” Shapley told a colleague the day after her death. Unaware of her passing, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences four years later contacted the Harvard Observatory to inquire about her discovery, intending to use the information to nominate her for a Nobel Prize in Physics. But by the rules of the award, the names of deceased individuals could not be submitted.

Exploration

Empire Builder

In 1914 the world was plunged into turmoil as the Allied and Central powers rapidly faced off in the War to End All Wars, the four-year conflict that demolished old empires and reshaped the modern world. And yet, in this time of devastating upheaval, astronomy experienced some of its greatest discoveries. Vesto Slipher was measuring the fleeing spirals, Heber Curtis was ferreting out new ones, and Harlow Shapley was gearing up to move our Sun from its hallowed position at the center of the known universe. While the landscape of global politics was being redesigned, so too was our cosmos.

The Milky Way had long been pictured as relatively small, at most around 20,000 to 30,000 light-years wide (estimates at this