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  • (Y) AU - Best unit to measure distances to planets
  • (EE) Period-Luminosity Relationship - Cephied Variables
  • (M) H-R Diagram - Main Sequence Stars
  • (FF) Cephied variables - Helped to measure distances to nearby galaxies
  • (I) Type M stars - Red Giant stars
  • (H) Horsehead nebula - Absorption nebula
  • (C) Trifid Nebula - Emission Nebula
  • (B) Maunder minimum - The Sun
  • (F?,O) Whirlpool galaxy - Spiral galaxies
  • (U) Parsec - Best unit to measure distance to nearby stars
  • (Q) The most abundant galaxy type = Elliptical galaxies
  • (X) megaparsec - Best unit to measure distance to "the wall"
  • (W) kiloparsec - Best unit to measure distance to other stars in the Milky Way
  • Harlow Shapley – pioneer studies of binary stars and star clusters, He calculated that our sun is 30,000 light years from the center of the Milky Way
  • Henrietta Leavitt - she studied the brightness of stars and showed how that variable could be used to judge their distance
  • Ejnar Hertzsprung - he discovered high-luminosity, or giant, stars, he calculated the distance to the Small Magellanic Cloud, a graph in which the luminosity of a star is plotted against its surface temperature called Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.
  • Simon LaPlace - In his study of the gravitational attraction of spheroids, he formulated the fundamental differential equation in physics which now bears his name
  • Subra Chandrasekhar – His most famous discovery was that not all stars end up as white dwarf stars, but those retaining mass above a certain limit - today known as "Chandrasekhar's limit," undergo further collapse
  • Arno Penzias – along with Robert Wilson , their discovery has been used as evidence in support of the “big bang” theory that the universe was created by a giant explosion billions of years ago
  • Jocelyn Bell – she noticed an unusually regular signal, shown to be bursts of radio energy at a constant interval of just over a second - the first pulsar
  • Stephen Hawking – dealing with black holes, singularities, and the "big bang' theory of the origin of the universe. His popular writing is also notable, especially A Brief History of Time
  • Annie Cannon - Devising a system for classifying stellar spectra, she reorganized the classification of stars in terms of surface temperature and catalogued over 225,000 stars
  • Edwin Hubble – The numerical relationship between a galaxy's distance and the speed of recession is known as "Hubble's Constant.")
  • Carl Seyfert – he did pioneering research of nuclear emission in spiral galaxies, he published a paper on galaxies with bright nuclei that emit light with emission line spectrum, and exhibit characteristically broadened emission lines. These galaxies are since called Seyfert Galaxies
  • Edouard Roche – Roche Limit. It is the closest distance a body held together by self-gravity can come to a planet without being pulled apart by the planet's tidal (gravity) force. As a result, large moons cannot survive inside the Roche Limit
  • Karl Schwarzschild – The Schwarzschild radius is the critical radius at which an object becomes a black hole if collapsed or compressed indefinitely. At this radius the escape velocity is the speed of light. Its value is 9`mm/0¨35`in for Earth, 3`km/1¨9`mi for the Sun
  • R. Brent Tully - The Tully-Fisher relation is an empirical relationship between the luminosity of a spiral/irregular galaxy and its rotational velocity
  • (9) Virgo Cluster of Galaxies – 45-55 mil LY +/-
  • (2) Spica – 262 LY
  • (6) Large Magellanic Cloud – 190,000 LY
  • (8) Whirlpool Galaxy – 30-40 mil LY
  • (1) Alpha Centauri – 4.3 LY
  • (5) Center of the Milky Way – 8-10 kpc (* 1 pc = 3.26 LY)
  • (7) Andromeda Galaxy – 2.9 mil LY
  • (3) Deneb – 1,467 LY
  • (4) M4 (nearest globular cluster) – 7,000 LY