Harlow Shapley

Harolow Shapley (November 2, 1885 – October 20, 1972) was an American astronomer, known as "The Modern Copernicus," who discovered the Sun's position in the galaxy.

He used RR Lyrae stars to correctly estimate the size of the Milky Way Galaxy and the sun's position within it. In 1953 he proposed his "liquid water belt" theory, now known as the concept of a habitable zone.

He was born to Willis and Sarah (née Stowell) Shapley on a farm in Nashville, Missouri, and dropped out of school with only the equivalent of a fifth-grade education. After studying at home and covering crime stories as a newspaper reporter, Shapley returned to complete a six-year high school program in only two years, graduating as class valedictorian.

In 1907, at the age of 22, Harlow Shapley went to study journalism at University of Missouri. When he learned that the opening of the School of Journalism had been postponed for a year, he decided to study the first subject he came across in the course directory. Rejecting Archaeology, which Harlow later explained he couldn't pronounce, Harlow chose the next subject, Astronomy.

Post-graduation, Shapley received a fellowship to Princeton University for graduate work, where he studied under Henry Norris Russell and used the period-luminosity relation for Cepheid variable stars (discovered by Henrietta Swan Leavitt) to determine distances to globular clusters. He was instrumental in moving astronomy away from the idea that Cepheids were spectroscopic binaries, and toward the concept that they were pulsators. He was the first to realize that the Milky Way Galaxy was much larger than previously believed, and that the Sun's place in the galaxy was in a nondescript location. This discovery by Shapley is a key part of the Copernican principle, according to which the Earth is not at the center of our Solar System, our galaxy, or our Universe.

He married Martha Betz (1891-1981) in April 1914. She assisted her husband in astronomical research both at Mount Wilson and at Harvard Observatory. She produced numerous articles on eclipsing stars and other astronomical objects. They had one daughter and four sons, one of whom is a mathematician and economist Lloyd Shapley, who won a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012. His widow died in 1981.

On his religious views, Shapley was an atheist/agnostic.

Awards:

Henry Draper Medal of the National Academy of Sciences (1926)

Prix Jules Janssen of the French Astronomical Society (1933)

Rumford Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1933)

Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society (1934)[19]

Bruce Medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (1939)

Pius XI Medal (1941)

Franklin Medal (1945)

Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the American Astronomical Society (1950)

Named after him:

The crater Shapley on the Moon

Asteroid 1123 Shapleya

Shapley Supercluster

Harlow Shapley Visiting Lectureships In Astronomy, American Astronomical Society