Henrietta's Big Idea

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Henrietta Levitt discovered that the slower a cepheid variable star pulsed, the brighter it was. She helped scientists rethink the way they looked at the universe. A mathematician tried to nominate her for Nobel Prize in 1920s but she'd already died of cancer. Her discovery sits at the basis of all of the distant scales we use today.

In the early 1900s, Henrietta Leavitt made one of the most important discoveries in the history of astronomy: a yardstick to measure distances to faraway stars. Using this tool, scientists eventually transformed our understanding of the universe. They realized space was expanding, that this expansion was accelerating, and that ultimately, everything will end.

This episode originally ran on June 30, 2021.

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