Henrietta Swan Leavitt (Abstract)

Volume 37 number 2 (2009)

Katy Sternberger

Abstract

(Abstract only) Henrietta Swan Leavitt, born in 1868, was a great woman astronomer. Though she is not widely known for her work, she studied Cepheid variable stars and devised a law which states that a star’s brightness is directly linked to the length of its period. This launched the quest to discover how to measure the universe.