This article is part of Overlooked, a series of obituaries about remarkable people whose deaths, beginning in 1851, went unreported in The Times.
In the early 20th century, when Henrietta Leavitt began studying photographs of distant stars at the Harvard College Observatory, astronomers had no idea how big the universe was. Debate raged over whether all of the objects visible through the telescopes of the day were within our own Milky Way galaxy, or whether other galaxies — or “island universes,” as they were then called — might exist somewhere out in space.
Leavitt, working as a poorly paid member of a team of mostly women who cataloged data for the scientists at the observatory, found a way to peer out into the great unknown and measure it.