I'm Elise Hugh, you're listening to Ted Talks Daily.

We're about to learn about the universe, its vastness, its dynamism, and how we know

all these things about it.

Speaking at Ted Women 2021, writer Maria Popova tells us a surprising story of a well-known

telescope and the people who made better understanding of the universe possible.

The port for Ted Talks Daily comes from Airbnb.

When you're staying at an Airbnb, you might be like me wondering, could my place be an

Airbnb and if it could, what could it earn?

I think about this all the time.

Sub, whose extra room in London was storing furniture until his mom had the idea to start

Airbnbing it, now that extra room helps pay the mortgage.

And out what your place could be earning at Airbnb.co.uk slash host.

In 1908, Henrietta Swan Levit, one of the women known as the Harvard Computers who changed

our understanding of the universe long before they could vote, was cataloging photographic

plates at the Harvard College Observatory single-handedly analyzing 2,000 variable stars.

Stars would fluctuate in brightness, kind of like a lighthouse beacon.

When she began noticing a distinct correlation between their brightness and their blinking

pattern, that correlation made it possible to measure the distance of stars for the very

first time furnishing the yardstick of the universe.

Meanwhile, a beautiful teenage boy in the Midwest was repressing his childhood love of astronomy

and beginning his legal studies to fulfill his dying father's demand for an ordinary,

reputable life.

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