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Emergent Structure: the First Two Centuries of the First Two Eons

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 September 2016

Virginia Trimble
Virginia Trimble*
Affiliation:
Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of California, Irvine CA 92697 USA, and Astronomy Department, University of Maryland, College Park MD 20742 USA

Abstract

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“Early” maps of the cosmos included the 26th dynasty air god Shu supporting the sky goddess Nut above the earth god Geb, Descartes' Voronoi tesselation, William Herschel's star gauging, and Carl Charlier's 1922 plot of the nebulae in NGC, which he intended as observational support for the fractal nature of large scale cosmic structure (about which he was probably wrong, though right about there being more than one level of clustering). Because Shapley, van Maanen, and others were still denying the very existence of external galaxies at the same time that Lundmark and Opik were measuring their distances and masses and Charlier plotting hierarchies, the story of the discovery of very large scale structure (and streaming) in the universe cannot be told in perfectly linear fashion. There are, however, half a dozen or so discrete phases that can be recognized and three underlying themes, (1) expanding horizons, (2) additional levels of structure, and (3) increasing mediocrity of our vantage point.

Type
Session III: Local Structure
Information
Symposium - International Astronomical Union , Volume 216: Maps of the Cosmos , 2005 , pp. 161 - 169
Copyright
Copyright © Astronomical Society of the Pacific 2005 

References

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