Vesto Slipher

Biography

Vesto Slipher spent nearly six decades at Lowell Observatory, where his patient spectroscopic studies of spiral nebulae yielded the first convincing radial velocity measurements and gave astronomers a new way to read the motions of distant systems.

Those precise Doppler shifts revealed that many nebulae recede from the solar system and laid a foundation for later understanding of an expanding universe, while he guided the observatory through decades of planetary and stellar research with a steady hand.