For a very long time, scientists believed that stars were composed primarily of iron - until 25-year-old Harvard Observatory student Cecilia Payne proved completely different in her PhD thesis. The work, written in 1925, was so innovative that the young scientist was asked to "take his time with conclusions" and hold them back. A few years later, her discovery was published under a different name …
Cecilia Payne has done a great job matching the spectral types of stars with their temperatures. Based on the results, she made the revolutionary assumption that stars are very different from planets in their chemical composition and consist mainly of hydrogen and helium.
The scientific community did not seem to be ready to immediately accept this idea, and Payne's colleagues persuaded to write in the conclusion that the results obtained were most likely incorrect. Several years later, it was proven that Cecilia Payne was absolutely right. However, she was effectively deprived of her pioneering laurels, despite the fact that her discovery was one of the greatest in astronomy.
In 2002, Jeremy Knowles, Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University, said of Cecilia: “Since her death in 1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not even been honored with a plaque. In newspaper obituaries, her greatest discovery was not mentioned. […] Every high school student knows that Newton discovered gravity, Darwin discovered evolution, and even that Einstein created the theory of relativity. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, textbooks simply say that hydrogen is the most abundant element in it. And no one ever asks the question, how do we know this. … After being awarded her doctoral degree, she taught at the Faculty of Astronomy, but her lectures were not listed in the course catalog. She was doing graduate studies without status; she did not have a research permit;and her small salary was classified as "equipment". And yet she survived and thrived."
Cecilia was born in 1900 in Wendover (England). From a young age, she dreamed of becoming a scientist and passionately wanted to achieve her goal. In 1919, Cecilia managed to get a scholarship to Newham College, Cambridge University, to study in the Faculty of Natural Sciences. Despite the fact that the course was successfully completed by her, she did not receive an academic degree (Cambridge did not issue degrees to women until 1948).
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Cecilia realized that with the conservative order prevailing in the British scientific community, she could only become a school teacher. But then she was lucky: the director of the Harvard College Observatory, Harlow Shapley, invited her to pursue a scientific career at Harvard. So she moved to the USA.
Cecilia's former teacher, astrophysicist Arthur Eddington, wrote a recommendation for her, in which he said: “She has achieved extensive knowledge in the field of physical science, including astronomy, and has valuable qualities for work - energy and enthusiasm … I believe that if you give her opportunity, she will devote her whole life to astronomy and will not want to run away after several years of training to get married."
In 1923, Cecilia Payne became a Research Fellow at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and two years later, the first person to receive a PhD in Astronomy for her dissertation, "Stellar Atmospheres," from the Harvard Observatory. True, she was awarded the degree by Radcliffe College, not Harvard.
The groundbreaking dissertation, in which Cecilia Payne argued that stars are composed primarily of helium and hydrogen, was initially questioned. Payne's colleague, astronomer Henry Norris Russell, who doubted her theory, persuaded Cecilia not to formally submit her dissertation. And in 1930 he published her discovery as his own. Cecilia's 200-page study was ignored and she was denied the merit due.
Over time, the truth nevertheless surfaced, and the astronomical community recognized Cecilia's contribution. The famous astronomer Otto Struve spoke of Payne's work as "the most brilliant Ph. D. thesis in the history of astronomy."
Unfortunately, Cecilia Payne has faced gender discrimination more than once throughout her academic career. So, she was dissuaded from publishing the results of studies of the Stark effect in the spectra of the hottest stars and interstellar absorption. These discoveries were later presented by other scientists and are attributed to them.
In 1934 Payne married the Russian émigré Sergei Gaposhkin. He was also an astrophysicist, and the couple began to do what they loved together. For many years, Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkina taught and was engaged in scientific work practically free of charge. She did not have a professor position and was listed as a technical assistant to her scientific advisor. It was only in 1956 that Cecilia received the title of Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University - the first among women scientists.
Despite the discrimination she faced, Cecilia stood firm and paved the way for other women in science. Today she is known as one of the greatest stars in astronomy.
Author: Eva Tushenkina