He is pictured here in the Swiss Patent Office where he did much of his defining work. One reason Einstein was awarded the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics was to make the prize more prestigious. Working at Harvard College Observatory , Leavitt precisely calibrated the photographic magnitudes of 47 stars to which all other stars could be compared. Leavitt discovered and cataloged over 1500 variable stars in the nearby Magellanic Clouds . From this catalog, Leavitt discovered that brighter Cepheid variable stars take longer to vary, a fact used today to calibrate the distance scale of our universe .
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