The Breaking Point

The Woman Who Counted Stars and Changed the Universe

Episode Summary

In the 1920s, Henrietta Swan Leavitt was hired to measure stars — not study them. But buried inside her meticulous data was a mathematical relationship so powerful it would shatter humanity's understanding of the size of the cosmos and hand Edwin Hubble the ruler he needed to discover that the universe is expanding. She never received the Nobel Prize. She never even knew how far her discovery had traveled.