Cosmos
Story of Edward Charles Pickering
We learn about how Edward Charles Pickering formed a team of women to study the stars and the Universe. He called them computers.
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Video Transcript
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in 1901
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Harvard
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was a man's world
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but an astronomer named
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Edward Charles Pickering
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broke that rule
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I'll pickering's office is just down the hallway
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and that door over there leads to the room where he keeps his
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computers
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we're supposed to call those women
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computers but
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I've heard more than one fellow refer to those gals [censored]
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pickering's Harem
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Pickering a similar the team of women
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to map and classify the types of stars
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one of them
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provided the key to our understanding of the substance of the Stars
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and another
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devised a way for us to calculate the size of the universe
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for some reason you probably never heard of either of them
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wonder why
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that's
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Annie Jump Cannon
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the leader of the team
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before she was through
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she catalogued a quarter of a million stars
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number 11
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is the p7
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that I see only in the Pea teeth Cannon lost her hearing during a bout of scarlet fever when she was a young woman
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number 12 is a B6
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that's Henrietta Swan Leavitt
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she's also deaf
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and she's the other great scientist in the room
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Leavitt discover the law that astronomers still use more than a century later
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to measure the distances to the stars
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and the size of the cosmos itself
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Annie Jump Cannon sent out a Christmas card explaining what she and her sisters were actually doing
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the light from a star is allowed to fall through a prison placed in the telescope she wrote
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that's magnified
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The Starlight is split up into a band
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showing its component colors
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the red Ray's going to one hand
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and the Violet to the other
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this is the spectrum of the star
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it shows the presence of fine dark lines
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by comparing them with lines given by glowing substances in the laboratory
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we can determine
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that the same elements familiar to us on the earth
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also exist
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in the outermost star
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this is plate number 1 2 3 5 8 be
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number one
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at this plague
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is the p-type star
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book that Abby too
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it took Cannon decades to classify the spectral character
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of hundreds of thousands of stars according to the scheme that she devised
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can and discovered that the Stars fell into a continuous sequence
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of seven broad categories
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according to their spectral line patterns
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each was designated by a letter
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but the spectral lines of two stars in the same letter class
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could differ in subtle ways
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minut variations that can and learn to recognize from memory
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to distinguish these Spectra from one another
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she assigned 10 numerical subcategories for each class
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Annie Jump Cannon or
