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White to move and mate in two #374. Also, Happy Birthday to Henrietta Leavitt [1]
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Date: 2023-07-04
Today we celebrate the birthday of Henrietta Swan Leavitt (born July 4, 1868, Lancaster, MA, died December 12, 1921, Cambridge, MA). Leavitt was an American astronomer known for her discovery of the relationship between the luminosity and the period of Cepheid variables, pulsating stars that vary in brightness in precise periods ranging from a few days to several months. The period–luminosity relationship, now known as "Leavitt's law", and the observed luminosity could then be used calculate the distance to the star.
Earlier parallax based techniques allowed measurement of distances up to several hundred light years. Leavitt's law made the Cepheid variable stars the first "standard candle" in astronomy, allowing scientists to compute distances up to 20 million light years.
From www.cfa.harvard.edu/… (edited) —
A few years after getting her degree from Harvard in 1892, Leavitt opted to volunteer as a research assistant at the Harvard College Observatory, where she worked under Edward Pickering, the observatory's director, who had brought together a group of women to catalog all the stars captured on Harvard's photographic plate collection. These skilled workers were not allowed to operate telescopes, but they contributed to the analysis of data that led to major scientific discoveries. Some of the women from this group, called "computers," classified stars by their colors, brightness, and spectra. Pickering assigned Leavitt the task of studying variable stars, a type of star that varies in brightness over time. In a few years of meticulous work, Leavitt identified 1,777 variable stars. In 1908, Leavitt published the results of her studies in the Annals of the Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College, noting that the brighter variables had longer periods. In a 1912 paper, Leavitt examined the relationship between the periods and the brightness of a sample of 25 of the Cepheids variables in the Small Magellanic Cloud. As a woman, Leavitt was not permitted to take up the theoretical work that would have enabled her discovery of the unique property of Cepheid stars to be put into practice. That activity was reserved men. She died before realizing the full impact of her discovery.
Her discovery led to the accurate estimation of the distance of several Cepheid variables and the realization that several of them resided in galaxies outside our Milky Way galaxy.
The accomplishments of Edwin Hubble, the American astronomer who established that the universe is expanding, also were made possible by Leavitt's groundbreaking research. Hubble often said that Leavitt deserved the Nobel Prize for her work. She might have been awarded one if she had lived long enough.
Leavitt's scientific work at Harvard was frequently interrupted by illness and her hearing had started deteriorating before she joined Pickering’s group. She died at the age of 53 from stomach cancer.
Now let’s apply our sharp minds to solving today’s puzzle, composed by Godfrey F. Heathcote in 1890, when Leavitt was studying at Harvard.
FEN for today’s puzzle — 8/b3p3/r2Pr1p1/4k3/p2N1R2/Q6N/1P1p3P/3K2BB
Chess puzzle is published on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, at 6:00 p.m. ET. Click here to see previous puzzles.
Further Reading:
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