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The Scientific Scrapbook

Harlow Shapley Discovers 6000 Galaxies, Six Clusters

Looking through an opening in the vast cloud of cosmic dust that fills the Milky Way System, Harlow Shapley. Director of the Harvard College Observatory, has discovered a staggering total of about 6,000 now galaxies, each composed of thousands of millions of stars and suns.

In addition, six clusters of galaxies, super-systems of stars revealing higher orders of universes, have been found.

"A considerable number of galaxies in a very low galactic-latitude," Shapley reports "Indicates the presence in the Perseus-Cassiopela region of a window."

It is through this window that he has made his momentous discoveries.

The study of the relative distribution of stars gives an indication of the total amount of obscuring material, assuming a uniformity in the distribution of stars in a given region.

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