Mercury,
May/June 2001 Table of Contents
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Heber
D. Curtis |
Heber
D. Curtis was the first to prove that there were galaxies beyond
our Milky Way.
by
Donald E. Osterbrock
Like
Sir Thomas More, the "man for all seasons," successively
a merchant, a writer, an adviser to the king, an archbishop, a condemned
prisoner, and eventually a saint, Heber D. Curtis went through many
careers in astronomy. He succeeded in each one of them, but he eventually
left the land of big telescopes on his own volition. Today he is
best remembered for his most important scientific discovery, that
the spiral "nebulae" are really "island universes"
or galaxies, like our Milky Way. But most astronomers, conservative
then as now, were slow to accept his conclusions.
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