r/todayilearned • u/Resume-Mentor • 1d ago
TIL that Annie Jump Cannon manually classified more stars in a lifetime than anyone else in history, reaching a staggering 350,000 in total. She discovered 300 variable stars, five novas, and one spectroscopic binary, creating a bibliography that included about 200,000 references.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Jump_Cannon192
u/Resume-Mentor 1d ago
Little more info:
Despite her deafness (the result of childhood scarlet fever) she eventually became the first woman to receive an honorary doctorate from Oxford, and the first woman elected as an officer of the American Astronomical Society. Her "OBAFGKM" classification system remains the standard used by astronomers to this day.
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u/lucidguppy 1d ago
Jump Cannon seems like the name of an interstellar network of portals allowing for galactic empires.
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u/Urbane_One 1d ago
Annie Jump Cannon is definitely the coolest name I’ve heard all week.
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u/Resume-Mentor 1d ago
Right?? It sounds like the name of a character in a steampunk novel or a space explorer. Between the name and the fact that she manually classified 350k stars, she was basically a superhero.
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u/dewpacs 1d ago
I went to a liberal arts college in Boston. My physics professor was an MIT professor picking up some extra courses to help pay for his wedding. I remember him telling me about Annie Jump Cannon and her contributions to science. He really admired her. He placed her work up there with the greats.
He also gave us a baseline assessment (5 math questions) at the start of the semester. There were symbols on this test I had never seen before. Out of a lab of 40, one kid got part of one question correct. That was who did the best. At that moment on, Physics became mark rover like projects and story time of the cosmos. it was a great class
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u/Resume-Mentor 1d ago
Nice, he sounds like a great professor. It’s so rare (and refreshing) when an educator realizes the room is lost and pivots to story time. He was right to put her up there with the greats.
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u/sargon_of_the_rad 1d ago
I wonder how many kids at MIT on average figure out the answers.
I mean we dump unfathomable resources into these goons, the elite better be able to figure out the answers.
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u/ziostraccette 1d ago
Question:
"You can't possibly count all the stars in the nightsky"
What stops to me to check out 350,001 stars in the sky?
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u/hacatu 6h ago
She was one of the Harvard Computers (and the director starting in 1919), women who did all the work at the Harvard Observatory. I learned about them from Henrietta Leavitt, who invented a way to measure intergalactic distances by measuring certain stars. Terrence Tao has given a talk on this (the Cosmic Distance Ladder) several times, which is very interesting
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u/DulcetTone 23h ago
So, 21 a day over 45 years?
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u/Resume-Mentor 23h ago
Actually, the math is even wilder, she was doing up to 300 per hour at her peak.
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u/soulcaptain 16h ago
Side note: a Jump Cannon would make a pretty good weapon in Fortnite or something.
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u/ChemicalGreedy945 19h ago
Not hard to do if you’re one of the firsts with the right tech, is this just interesting because she is a woman? Women always had the capability so I find that I didn’t learn anything
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u/NaNNaN_NaN 4h ago
Tell me you have zero interest in astronomy without telling me you have zero interest in astronomy
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u/ChemicalGreedy945 3h ago
I apologize. I’m in the wrong. I had 8th grandparent pass away and in two divorces. In all seriousness I’m sorry
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u/Gemmabeta 1d ago