A Family Affair

By Jeremy Bailin, Nicolle Zellner, and Sethanne Howard

It’s not atypical for children to follow in the footsteps of their parents or for siblings to have similar career paths. During our research for various other blog posts, the editors of AASWomen were surprised to see so many family connections in the field of Astronomy and extending to planetary science and physics. We shouldn’t have been – the mother-daughter planet hunters Natalie and Natasha Batalha have already caught the attention of various news outlets. We tweeted a request for more family connections in these fields and were inundated with examples, which we list here in roughly chronological history. Do you know of more? If so, add them to the Comments section.

The earliest example of a female science lineage may be the mother-daughter-granddaughter line of women who lived c. 2334 BCE. According to some reports, Enheduanna (mother) was a princess, priestess, astronomer, and the world’s first known author. She lived in Ur in ancient Sumer. Two thousand years later in Alexandria, Egypt, the philosopher/astronomer Hypatia (~370-416CE) worked with her father, Theon. She taught philosophy at the Great Library in Alexandria, produced commentary on the works of her father, and also wrote her own book on astronomy. Hypatia invented the device for measuring the specific gravity of a liquid.

The Herschel Siblings, 1896
(Credit: Album/Wellcome Images)

Fast-forwarding several hundred years, we have the Herschels, perhaps the most well-documented family to share a passion for astronomy. Caroline (1750-1848) steadfastly assisted her brother William (1738-1822) while he painstakingly mapped the night sky. William discovered the planet Uranus. Caroline wrote down coordinates and other observations for William bringing necessary structure to his observations. Caroline became recognized for discovering several comets, and eventually she was awarded a gold medal for her lifetime of work. She was hired by the British government to finish William’s work and thus became the first ‘civil servant’ who was a woman. William’s son, John Herschel, was also an astronomer. He continued the star cataloging done by the Herschels and introduced the concept of studying individual stars for their properties.

In the pre-telescope era, Tycho and Sophie Brahe (brother and sister) made their own contributions to the advancement of science. Many of us are familiar with the observations of Tycho (1548-1601), which allowed Johannes Kepler (astronomer) to develop the laws of orbital motion. Sophie, a physician, helped Tycho with his observations.

Maria Magaretha Kirch (1670-1720) was the spouse of Gottfried Kirch (1639-1710).  He founded the Berlin Observatory in 1700 and was the first member in the Prussian academy (Leibniz was the second). Margaretha was an accomplished astronomer and a recipient of the gold medal of the Prussian Royal Academy for discovering a comet. Of her 14 children her daughters, Christine (1696-1782) and Magharetha (1703-1744), and her son, Christfried (1694-1740), were all astronomers and continued the work of their parents. After Christfried’s death, Christine even came on the payroll of the academy (a novum at that time) with a considerable salary. 

In more contemporary times, we have a slew of relatives who work or worked together in the same field or parents who (intentionally or not) influenced their children to pursue careers in science:

Mother/daughter or son

• Paris Pişmiş (1911-1999) and daughter Elsa Recillas are both astronomers. Her son, Sevín Recillas Pishmish, became a mathematician. Recillas married astronomer Carlos Cruz-González, and their daughter Irene Cruz-González also became an astronomer.
• Carol J.A. Rieke (1908-1999) and son George Rieke.
• mother Vera Rubin (1928-2016) and daughter Judy Young (1952-2014) were both astronomers. Son Karl Rubin (1956- ) is a mathematician.   
• mother Yolanda Gómez (1962-2012) and son Vicente Rodriguez-Gomez are both astronomers.
• Ulyana Safronova is a physicist who does work in laboratory astrophysics; she has at least two daughters also doing physics: Alla and Marianna
• Silvia Torres Peimbert served as President of the International Astronomical Union. Her husband, Manuel Peimbert, and son Antonio Peimbert, are both astronomers.
  
  

L to R: Pişmiş (Credit: BAAS), Recillas Pishmish (Credit: CONAHCYT), Cruz-González (Credit: UNAM)

Father/daughter or son

• Georg Christoph Eimmart was an avid amateur astronomer (1638-1705), and his daughter Maria Calara Eimmart (1676–1707) produced some of the most striking astronomical art since the invention of the telescope
• Norman Pogson (1821-1891) discovered several minor planets and made observations on comets and daughter Isis Pogson (1852-1945), who was one of the first women to be elected as a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society
• Vernon Barger (Physics) and Amy Barger (astronomy)
• Jeff Hester and Janice Hester 
• Jerry Ostriker and Eve Ostriker
• Dan Gesari and Suvi Gezari
• Ralph Wijers and daughter Nastasha Wijers 
• Sean Matt and Cayenne Matt
  
  

Siblings

• sister Joan Feynman (1927-2020) and brother Richard Feynman (1918-1988)
• Emily Hardegree-Ullman and Kevin and Michael all work in the field of astronomy
• Leslie Young and Eliot Young
• sisters Else Starkenburg and Tjitske Starkenburg
• twin sisters Angela & Maren Hempel

Else Starkenburg (Credit: University of Gronigen) and Tjitske Starkenburg (Credit: Northwestern)

Other relationships

• Jan Smit, a geologist/paleontologist who studies the impact that killed the dinosaurs, and Wildrik Botjes (1810-1874), from an earlier generation in the family, who invented the planetarium
• E.E. Bernard (1857-1923) and his niece Mary Ross Calvert (1884– 1974)
• daughter Hamsa Padmanabhan, mother Vasanthi Padmanabhan, and father Thanu Padmanabhan are/were astrophysicists
• the Allers, with three generations of astronomers, including grandfather Lawrence H. Aller and granddaughter Monique Aller
• The Carters (father, daughter, grandson), three generations who worked in the fields of geodesy and astronomy.
• Elizabeth Lada and Charles Lada 

We thank the following for their contributions: Randall Smith, Maria Calara Eimmart, Tod Lauer, Renske Smit, Keren Sharon, Matthias Steinmetz, and Benjamin Lefebvre. If any corrections need to be made, please let us know.

[Ed. note: Completely serendipitously, Nature published an article titled "A family affair: how scientist parents’ career paths can influence children’s choices".]