🔭The Greats

In 1449 Ulugh Beg was assassinated on the orders of his own son while traveling toward Mecca, and religious opponents razed his observatory so completely that its location was forgotten for four and a half centuries, until the Russian archaeologist Vasily Vyatkin unearthed the great sextant's underground arc in 1908. The catalog escaped the wreckage: manuscript copies traveled west, and Oxford printed the star tables in 1665.

On an evening in November 1572, walking to supper, Tycho saw a brilliant new star in Cassiopeia and — by his own account — doubted his eyes, calling on servants and passing peasants to confirm it. He then measured its position night after night, showed it had no parallax and so lay far beyond the Moon in the supposedly changeless celestial realm, and published De nova stella in 1573, the book that gave the word "nova" to science.

On the night of 13 March 1781, between music engagements, Herschel turned his homemade 6.2-inch reflector on the sky from the garden of 19 New King Street, Bath, and noted a "curious either nebulous star or perhaps a comet" that showed a disk. He reported a comet; within months, computed orbits showed a planet beyond Saturn — the first ever discovered. He named it Georgium Sidus for George III, who answered with a royal pension; everyone else eventually called it Uranus.

In 1925 the Swedish mathematician Gösta Mittag-Leffler wrote to Leavitt at Harvard to say he intended to nominate her for the Nobel Prize in Physics for her Cepheid work. Director Harlow Shapley had to answer for her: Leavitt had died of cancer in 1921, aged 53, and the prize cannot go to the dead. By then her relation had already carried Hubble to Andromeda and was about to underwrite the expanding universe.

On the night of 5–6 October 1923 Hubble exposed plate H335H of the Andromeda nebula and marked three suspected novae "N." Checking earlier plates, he realized one was no nova but a Cepheid variable; he crossed out the N and wrote "VAR!" in red. Leavitt's law put the star at roughly 900,000 light-years — far outside the Milky Way — ending with one star the "island universe" debate that Shapley and Curtis had argued to a draw in 1920.

In 2018 Bell Burnell won the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics — worth $3 million, one of the largest awards in science — for the pulsar discovery and a lifetime of leadership. She gave away the entire sum to the Institute of Physics to fund doctoral scholarships for students from under-represented groups, remarking that people like her, who do not look like the standard-issue physicist, notice things others miss.

In 1965 Rubin became the first woman formally permitted to observe at Palomar Observatory, which had no women's restroom. She cut a skirt shape from paper and stuck it over the male figure on a door, announcing, "There is your ladies' room." A decade later her flat rotation curves — starting with Andromeda in 1970 — forced the field to accept that roughly 85% of the universe's matter is something no telescope has ever seen.