In the 13th year of our life, when the skies of our city were still tolerably dark,

we observed two stars \beta Persei (Algol) and \delta Cephei from our balcony which
faced north on every night they were visible. Thus, we reproduced the beginnings of
one of the great, but less-appreciated, stories in science that took place in the
late 1700s. The story of variable stars, i.e. stars whose brightness changes over
time, goes back even earlier. Bullialdus in the late 1600s observed the star o Ceti
(Mira) for 6 years and established that it varies dramatically in its brightness
(magnitude) over a period of 333 days. Presciently he declared that the variability
was because of dark regions on the star that periodically presented themselves to
the earth even as the sunspots. Newton in his Principia adopted the same
explanation for the variability in Mira and subsequently after further observations
Wilhelm Herschel too believed this to be the cause for stellar variability. Today
we know that it is not the case for the Mira variables but then star spots do play
a role for rotating variables like BY Draconis.

The first evidence for other mechanisms of variability came up over 100 years later
when the astronomers Edward Pigott and young, deaf Goodricke studied \beta Persei
(Algol) and \delta Cephei. They concluded that the variability of the former might
be due to an eclipse by a darker body. Thus, the theory of eclipsing binaries was
born and was subsequently confirmed for Algol-type variables. For \delta Cephei
Goodricke proposed the starspot mechanism. \eta Aquilae and \delta Cephei
discovered by Pigott and Goodricke were the founder members of a whole class of
regularly varying stars like it which were subsequently discovered: the Cepheids.
The Cepheids, unlike the Miras tended to be of shorter period several days rather
than of an order closer to an year. Further, the Miras, unlike the Cepheids, while
having a general periodicity did not strictly adhere to it both in terms of
temporal period and actual magnitudes attained at maxima or minima. Like the Algol-
type variables the Cepheids instead showed a strict periodicity in their light
variation (the light curve) and also the maximum and minimum brightness they
attained (amplitude). However, unlike the Algol-type variables but like the Miras
they continuously varied in their brightness. This form of variability completely
baffled the astronomers and physicists, who nevertheless came to believe in some
kind of eclipse mechanism shortly after their discovery based on the strict
periodicity they shared with the Algol and \beta Lyrae type eclipsing variables.
This idea remained in force for more than a century. In the late 1800s the German
physicist August Ritter carried out one of the first detailed studies on gas
spheres. In course of that he almost prophetically predicted an alternative
mechanism for variability of stars i.e. pulsation; however, it was totally ignored
by astronomers.

But at the turn of that century Schwarzschilds study of the Cepheid \eta Aquilae
showed that its visual light variability was also accompanied by color (spectral
type) variability. In 1908 Leavitt, while studying variables from the Small
Magellanic cloud, discovered that for some variables with a regularly periodic
light curves their period was directly correlated with their apparent luminosity
(given that all stars in a Magellanic cloud were expected to be at roughly the same
distance from our solar system). By 1912 she had established that this period-
luminosity law specifically applied to Cepheids. Shortly thereafter Shapley
marshalled various lines of evidence to suggest that the variability of Cepheids
was likely not due to eclipses but due to pulsations. In the coming years Eddington
developed the first physical theory for pulsating Cepheids by modeling them as
thermodynamic engines that operate by pulsation, wherein the energy gain and
dissipation compensate each other. Subsequent observations of the radial velocity
of Cepheid derived from spectroscopy by Baade and others helped confirm the
pulsation theory and also refined it further even as the physics of the stars was
being better understood. In this context we should point out the key contribution
of the sadly forgotten Hindu astronomer Hari Keshab Sen from Prayag, who was also a
student of Vedic literature and studied the origin of the Hindu concepts of
infinity in the upaniad-s. In 1948 while at the Harvard observatory, which was the
great center of variable star research, he presented the first refined model for
Cepheid variability: He showed that to explain the Cepheid variability one needed
to develop a correct model for the internal structure of the star. He showed that
for a star the ratio of the central gas density to its mean gas density was of key
importance to explain variability. His work showed that this is particularly high
Cepheids and using this in the model could explain the asymmetric amplitude of the
Cepheid variability.

In years following the discovery of the period-luminosity law it was used by

Hertzsprung to calculate the distance of the Magellanic clouds from the solar
system. While this attempt had its errors it was the beginning of one of the most
important developments in all of science: the use of Cepheids to measure the size
of our universe, starting from the realization that the Magellanic clouds lay
outside our own galaxy. The first step in correctly applying the period-luminosity
law to measure the universe was the realization that the Cepheids were not a
monolithic group but included a range of distinct families each obeying their own
period-luminosity relationship: