HENRIETTA SWAN LEAVITT

This groundbreaking astronomer helped us discover our place in the universe

- NIKOLE ROBINSON

Henrietta Swan Leavitt was born in 1868 in Massachusetts, the daughter of a congregational minister and the oldest of seven children. In her youth she attended Oberlin College and the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women, later named Radcliffe College, the latter of which she graduated from with a bachelor's degree in 1892. Her course of study was originally in the liberal arts, but in her last year of college she embarked on a course in astronomy, which she took to with great enthusiasm.

After completing her degree, in 1895 Leavitt began volunteering at Harvard College Observatory under American astronomer Edward Pickering. She was part of a group known as the Harvard Computers, a group of skilled women employed by Pickering to sift through mountains of astronomical data. Each woman was given a different set of data to catalogue and analyse. Leavitt was assigned to study variable stars, those whose luminosities vary over time but whose exact workings were poorly understood.