Henrietta Swan Leavitt they became an important part of the evidence that "spiral nebulae" are independent galaxies located far outside of our own Milky Way. Thus, Leavitt's discovery would forever change our picture of the universe, as it prompted Harlow Shapley to move our Sun from the center of the galaxy in the "Great Debate" and Edwin Hubble to move our galaxy from the center of the universe. Leavitt's discovery of a way to accurately measure distances on an inter-galactic scale, paved the way for modern astronomy's understanding of the structure and scale of the universe. The accomplishments of Edwin Hubble, the American
Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies The spiral arms in these galaxies have an asymmetric appearance. One spiral arm may appear to be considerably brighter than the other. In the photographic plates produced by Arp, the bright arm would look dark or "heavy". While most of these galaxies (such as M101 and NGC 6946) are simply asymmetric spiral galaxies, NGC 6365 is an interacting pair of galaxies where one of the two galaxies is viewed edge-on and just happens to lie where the spiral arm for the other face-on galaxy would be visible. These are galaxies that look like a stretched-out S shape (or like the