(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . The Daily Bucket. This day 100 years ago our universe got real big. A sequence of events. [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2023-10-06 I see I’ve been scooped. "VAR!" 100 years ago tonight, Edwin Hubble found a star that revealed the vastness of the Universe diary by skralyx of October 4, 2023 I’m going to go ahead anyway, because there’s a whole lot in this diary that is not in skralyx’s. And, I’ve put in a helluva lot of time writing this, so there’s that. And this diary format is a sequence which is different from skralyx’s, so there’s that too. And, this diary is a Daily Bucket, so there’s the ice cream on top of the pie if you needed any. 😏 ***** The Daily Bucket is a nature refuge. We amicably discuss animals, weather, climate, soil, plants, waters and note life’s patterns. We invite you to note what you are seeing around you in your own part of the world, and to share your observations in the comments below. Each note is a record that we can refer to in the future as we try to understand the phenological patterns that are quietly unwinding around us. To have the Daily Bucket in your Activity Stream, visit Backyard Science’s profile page and click on Follow. One of my idler passions and pastimes is watching shows about astronomy. In a recent re-watching of one, I noticed that today, this very day, October 6, 2023, marks the 100th anniversary of the discovery in which our universe went from being the relatively-puny size of our entire Milky Way galaxy to a universe populated with, well, heck, let the expert tell you. [You’re not going to want to listen much after the first ten seconds or so, believe me. So I put in the second video.] In other words not just merely staggeringly vast beyond all comprehension and belief, but really big. One-hundred billion galaxies times 100 billion stars per galaxy, equals, uh, a shed-load of stars, that big. Edwin Hubble, the British-accent-and-mannerisms-and-dress-affected American astronomer, was the first to see a Cepheid Variable star that was outside the Milky Way. This star got the really cool name of Vee Wun. Though the universe is filled with billions upon billions of stars, the discovery of a single variable star in 1923 altered the course of modern astronomy. … The star goes by the inauspicious name of Hubble variable number one, or V1, and resides in the outer regions of the neighboring Andromeda galaxy, or M31. But in the early 1900s, most astronomers considered the Milky Way a single "island universe" of stars, with nothing observable beyond its boundaries. Andromeda was cataloged as just one of many faint, fuzzy patches of light astronomers called "spiral nebulae." Were these spiral nebulae part of the Milky Way or were they independent island universes lying outside our galaxy? Astronomers didn't know for sure... … The star helped Hubble show that Andromeda was beyond our galaxy and settled the debate over the status of the spiral nebulae. The universe became a much bigger place after Hubble's discovery, much to the dismay of astronomer Harlow Shapley, who believed the fuzzy nebulae were part of our Milky Way. … Hubble obtained enough observations of V1 […] to calculate its distance. The star turned out to be 1 million light-years from Earth, more than three times Shapley's calculated diameter of the Milky Way. … Improved measurements now place Andromeda at 2 million light-years away. Source: NASA; Hubble Views the Star that Changed the Universe. It goes without saying (so why am I saying it?; I dislike cliche phrases but what’s a junk writer to do?) that Hubble’s discovery (that the Milky Way was not the sum total of all there was to the extent of the universe) was just one event in a long line of antecedent cosmological claims and discoveries, one following the other as the centuries passed by. Therein lies a sequence. Bet you was wondering whether I was ever going to get to a sequence, this being Friday Sequence Daily Bucket and all. So here’s a very brief sequential list leading up to Hubble, starting about nineteen hundred years ago and starring (heh, heh, see what I did there?) some galactic (ooooh) personalities. 💫🌟⭐✨🌠 Ptolemy. c. 100 – c. 170 AD. Pretty much the first person to put forth the idea of planetary systems, with the Earth, mistakenly, at the center of it all; the geocentric model of the universe. The sun was out there between Venus and Mars. Well, we were a bit naive back then, weren’t we? Also: vaingloriously self-centered. This view held, given our nature, for a good twelve hundred years. The scheme of the aforementioned division of spheres. · The empyrean (fiery) heaven,dwelling of God and of all the selected · 10 Tenth heaven, first cause · 9 Ninth heaven, crystalline · 8 Eighth heaven of the firmament · 7 Heaven of Saturn · 6 Jupiter · 5 Mars · 4 Sun · 3Venus · 2 Mercury · 1 Moon Copernicus 1473 – 1543. This smarter guy (Aristarchus of Samos notwithstanding) came along and said “Hey, waiddaminnit! What I’m seein’ don’t match what everybody’s been sayin’. Sumpin’s wrong with ol’ Ptolemy here. Looks to me like the sun is at the center, and everything revolves around it, not us.” For this egregious heresy Copernicus was burned at the stake, drawn and quartered, hung, beheaded, and stoned. No, I made that up. He actually died from a stroke at age 70. Tycho Brahe 1546 - 1601. Say what you will about the Lascaux cave paintings and Stonehenge and any other Ancient Astronomery, Tycho was the first to get really busy with building fancy-schmancy Star&Planet measuring machines and lining things up, like shown in these pictures: The quadrant (radius c. 194cm) was made from brass and was affixed to a wall that was oriented precisely north-south. The observer (right) views a star through the opposite opening (upper left) to determine the star's altitude as it passes through the meridian. An assistant (lower right) reads the time off a clock and another one (lower left) records the measurements. The area above the quadrant is filled with a mural painting showing several other of Brahe's instruments. Basically, the objects on blue orbits (the Moon and the Sun and the fixed stars) revolve around the Earth. The objects on orange orbits (Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn) revolve around the Sun. All is surrounded by a sphere of fixed stars (though they are fixed only with respect to each other, for the sphere revolves around the earth). The system is essentially geocentric, though everything except for the moon and the fixed stars and the earth centre itself revolves around the Sun. And he still got it wrong, putting the Earth at the center. Know why? He was no dummy. He knew saying anything else would be against The Church, and that kind of loose lips could get you burned at the stake. But that’s not the important stuff about Brahe. Here’s what you really need to know and remember about this guy: In 1566 at the age of 20, he lost part of his nose in a duel… ... For the rest of his life, Brahe wore a prosthetic nose. His fake nose was likely made of copper, although he probably also had gold and silver noses around for special occasions. … He lived in a castle, where he kept a rather unusual group of regular entertainers. He employed a little person called Jepp, who Brahe believed possessed psychic powers. Jepp was his court jester, and spent most dinners under the table. It's probably best not to speculate on just why Brahe preferred that arrangement. Then there was Brahe's elk, a tame beast that Brahe kept as a prized pet. The elk met a rather bizarre end, reportedly drinking a lot of beer while visiting a nobleman on Brahe's behalf, after which it fell down the stairs and died. Yes, that entire sentence was about an elk. Source: You really want a source on this? Galileo Galilei 1564 — 1642. You already know all about this guy. He really ruffled some church-y feathers by using balls on an inclined ramp to invent the telescope. Aaaaannnnnnnddddd…. he put the Sun at the center of us all, rendering us puny humans just another batch of bacteria on a wet rock spinning somewhere in space. i.e. NOT the center of the Universe. For inventing the ball-driven telescope and putting the sun where it belonged (thereby kicking Earth and its humans out of center place) , his house was arrested and his final words were “Your ad here!” Isaac Newton 1642 — 1727. Major self-absorbed pedant and petulant co-inventor of teenage torture known as calculus. He invented gravity, which Galileo had not. He stuck a stick in his eye because, hey, I said he was self-absorbed, didn’t I? What kind of a freak-nut does that and becomes applauded for it? He invented apples too, at the same time as perpendicular. Gotta love him for his rainbows, though. He invented a lot of rainbows. Anyway, by inventing gravity he proved the Sun was at the center of the universe, and that’s where it remains to this day. Don’t believe me? Go stand on the sun and look out and all you’ll see is the rest of the universe. QED. Oh, and somethingsomethingsomething about inventing the reflecting telescope, which has made a lot of mirror manufacturers really rich. William Herschel 1738 — 1822. We’re finally coming out of the Stone Age with this guy, because he was the first really smart guy to recognize where the smarts really resided: his sister, Caroline. When it came to building reflecting telescopes, Carol and Bill didn’t fool around. Bigger was better, end of argument. William Herschel’s giant 40-foot telescope. With this pup, you can see your house from here. So, today we give Bill the credit for discovering the planet with the name we can all make fun of (but we don’t because we’re not a bunch of Beavises and Buttheads, now are we?), but in the case of the Herschels we sort of give short shrift to the woman who did as much as, if not more, astronomical work than her renowned brother. No less important work at any rate. Women have been given the short shrift too long, and if in my little way I can help set that right, I will. In the course of her life as an astronomer, Caroline — Helped to construct and polish the precision speculum metal mirrors used in the telescopes William and she built. The polishing was tedious to the max, but indispensable to achieving the quality necessary for truly professional exploratory astronomy. — Acted as William’s recorder of telescopic observations, because he was being hampered by having to pull away from the large outdoor telescope, run inside and write all his information down, which caused delay because he had to let his eyes adjust to the candle and lamp light, and then additional delay as his eyes had to readjust to the dark before he could get back on the telescope. — In her own right, with a telescope of her own that William built for her, discovered eight comets and fourteen new nebulae. Her eight comets were published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society between 1782 and 1787. Caroline also continued to serve as William Herschel's assistant, often taking notes while he observed at the telescope. For her work as William's assistant, she was granted an annual salary of £50 by George III. Her appointment made her the first female in England to be honoured with a government position. It also made her the first woman to be given a salary as an astronomer. Caroline continued her astronomical work after William's death in 1822. She worked to verify and confirm his findings as well as putting together catalogues of nebulae. Towards the end of her life, she arranged two-and-a-half thousand nebulae and star clusters into zones of similar polar distances. She did this so that her nephew, John, could re-examine them systematically. Eventually, this list was enlarged and renamed the New General Catalogue. In 1828, she was awarded the Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society for her work. --wikipedia [bolding mine] Joseph Ritter von Fraunhofer 1787 — 1826. This is where astronomy turned into physics and chemistry. By inventing the spectroscope and developing diffraction grating, it could be determined exactly which of the natural elements (e.g. hydrogen, helium, lithium, etc.) were present and therefore constituents of the sun, stars, and planets. This was an incredible advancement for astronomy. At the very least, it demonstrated that there was nothing “out there” that wasn’t also right here on Planet Earth, meaning the entire universe could be understood in strictly natural terms. It also let us understand that while all stars were suns, these suns were by no means identical one to the other. More study was needed! Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel 1784 — 1846. I’m not going to dwell long on this fellow. For our purposes what we really need to know is he developed a method, stellar parallax, for reliably determining the distance of stars from our solar system. It involved math, specifically trigonometry, so knowing my audience here fairly well, I’ll drop it there. This was very important, though, because up until now we really didn’t have much of a clue as to the actual size of the observable universe, meaning we did not know how far the stars and nebulae we could see with our eyes and telescopes were away from us. Henrietta Swan Leavitt 1868 — 1921. She gets a photo, because in my semi-educated but still strictly personal opinion she’s one of the most important women to have ever existed in the history of astronomy. Maybe even the most important woman to have ever existed in the history of astronomy. Without her, Edwin Hubble could never have written “VAR!” on his photo plate in 1923, because it was Henrietta who discovered the “VAR”, Cepheid variable stars, in the first place. So, I’m going to quote myself, from a diary of long ago, about Henrietta Swan Leavitt. We’ve all looked up at the stars and we all see stars that are brighter than others, and just like car headlights up close or far away we intuit, from experience, that the brighter they are the closer they are. So, that goes for the stars too, right? The brighter, the closer. Nope, not necessarily. As we now know, some stars are intrinsically brighter than others, and a dim star, as seen by our naked eye, may actually be closer to Earth than a much brighter one immediately adjacent. So how could we figure which was what? Henrietta Swan Leavitt did just that. Encyclopaedia Britannica Leavitt’s outstanding achievement was her discovery in 1912 that in a certain class of variable stars, the Cepheid variables, the period of the cycle of fluctuation in brightness is highly regular and is determined by the actual luminosity of the star. The subsequent calibration of the period-luminosity curve allowed American astronomers Edwin Hubble, Harlow Shapley, and others to determine the distances of many Cepheid stars and consequently of the star clusters and galaxies in which they were observed. The most dramatic application was Hubble’s use in 1924 of a Cepheid variable to determine the distance to the great nebula in Andromeda, which was the first distance measurement for a galaxy outside the Milky Way. Although it was later discovered that there are actually two different types of Cepheid variable, the same method can still be applied separately to each type. Without Leavitt’s work (and tedious it was, so all the more kudos to her) we might still be guessing just how far away the stars actually are. Hubble. He got a great big telescope named after him, and not just any ol’ telescope but one actually up in outer space. I already covered him at the start of this diary. Need we say more? But if you want to, and I highly recommend it, go read skralyx’s diary, which I linked to at the beginning of this diary. 💫🌟⭐✨🌠 Now, let’s see if I can actually chain all of the mish-mash above into a sequential-ish synopsis, showing how one leads to the other. If I can do that, my work here today is finished. 1) Ptolemy said we’re a bunch of humongous balls circling one and another outside the other with the Earth dead center, which 2) led Copernicus to say “Yeah, but it’s the sun that’s at the center”, which 3) prompted Brahe to make super precise astronomical measurements without a telescope and he foolishly put the Earth back in the center, and 4) then along comes Galileo, who does use a telescope (which he did not invent, by the way, I just made that up for humor; he just really improved it (the telescope, not my humor) and was the first person to turn it to the planets and stars) and puts, correctly, the sun at the center and that darn near gets him executed for religious heresy, and when Galileo does finally die at age 77 (accredited to natural causes, yeah, but,) 5) Newton gets born and ponders why objects always fall perpendicular to the surface of the earth and realizes there must be a center of gravity to everything, and comes up with a bunch of maths that later allows us to actually travel to the moon and also invents the refracting telescope, but in the meantime 6) Herschel vastly improves Newton’s way-better-than-Galileo’s telescope, and sees things nearly unimaginable but his sister Caroline understood them quite well, thank you, which allowed 7) Fraunhofer to strap a spectroscope on a telescope and show that things are just made out of other things, and in a non-sequitur 8) Bessel uses stellar parallax to calculate, for the very first time ever, just how far away the planets and the sun and some stars were, but parallax only worked for stars that are relatively close to us so we still didn’t know how big the universe was and besides we were wrong at the time and didn’t know it about the Milky Way not being everything there was to the universe, but thanks to 9) Henrietta Swan Leavitt we could now figure out pretty much exactly how far away the stars were, but it finally took 10) Hubble, building on what Leavitt discovered, to show that there were galaxies beyond our own. And that’s how the universe got real big. And if you don’t believe me, just ask this guy: Now it’s your turn. What’s up in your neighborhood section of the sky, or the ground, or just off in the bushes? Please include your location in your comments and of course photos if you got ‘em! [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/10/6/2192887/-The-Daily-Bucket-This-day-100-years-ago-our-universe-got-real-big-A-sequence-of-events?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/