There are a lot of neat people stories in the history of science. I've recently been interested in women
astronomers who made major advances but are not as well known as the big 3: Caroline Herschel, Annie Jump Cannon and
Henrietta Swan Leavitt. This month I am writing about Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979) who stuck with
her convictions to make big discoveries on the nature of stars. She has a really nice autobiography called
"The Dyers Hand" (published in the collection "Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections") which I found
in the Stanford stacks during a recent visit.
Cecilia Payne grew up in Britain and went to University of Cambridge. There, a class by Eddington inspired her to pursue astronomy. Eddington encouraged her to go to the US where there were more opportunities for women. She applied to Harvard and
received a fellowship for graduate studies with Shapley.
There was a
long tradition at Harvard of using spectroscopy to study the abundances and
temperatures of stars. The O, B,
A, … classification scheme was developed there. In her 1925 PhD thesis with Shapley (from Radcliffe because
Harvard would not grant the degree to a woman, she was the first astronomy PhD
from Radcliffe), Payne was able to relate the stellar classification scheme to
the surface temperatures of stars.
Most importantly, she showed that hydrogen and helium are the dominant
elements that make up stars. This
seems obvious to us now, but was contrary to the belief at that time that the
sun had the same abundances as the Earth.
She had a disagreement about this with the prominent astronomer Russell. In fact, he persuaded her to add a note in her paper that the
H, He result was "almost certainly not real". In 1929 he acknowledged that she was
correct and cited her work in his further papers.
During the
1930's and 1940's Payne was a lecturer at Harvard and taught classes that were
not even listed in the catalog due to her gender. In 1956, she became a full professor of astronomy at Harvard
and then became the first woman department chair there. I thought it was particularly nice to
see that she won the Russell prize of the AAS in 1977. Both Eddington and Shapley were
impressed with her brilliance.
They became the mentors and promoters of her career that helped her have
a productive life as a professional astronomer in spite of the biases of the
time.
4 comments :
Her autobiography is well worth reading.
If you're looking for another great woman in astronomy, read up on Ruby Payne-Scott: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Payne-Scott :)
When I started Harvard as a freshman in 1959, she was professor and chairman (as we then said) of the Astronomy Department. How was I to know that she was the only female on the entire Harvard faculty?
Jay Pasachoff
I wrote up a blog post about Payne-Gaposchkin, centered around Struve's assertion that her dissertation was "undoubtedly the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy."
It is odd to me that Payne-Gaposchkin is not among the "big 3" famous female astronomers, since her career trajectory was more conventional and her contributions arguably more fundamental than those of Herschel, Cannon, and Leavitt.
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