Meet Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who figured out what the.
As she neared the end of her doctoral project on stellar spectra, Cecilia Payne wrote, “There followed months, almost a year as I remember, of utter bewilderment. Often I was in a state of exhaustion and despair, working all day and late into the night” ( 1 ).
Payne-Gaposchkin's PhD thesis related the spectral class of stars to their temperature, and showed that absorption lines vary because of different amounts of ionization at different temperatures, not because of different amounts of elements, as was previously thought.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin is one of the most famous astronomers in history. She successfully determined the composition of actual stardust in her 1925 PhD thesis. This story is another sad story of a woman being denied credit for no proper reason. As part of her thesis, Payne-Gaposchkin concluded that stars are composed mainly of hydrogen and.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979) was a pioneer in the field of astronomy and one of the most eminent female astronomers of the twentieth century. She was the first to apply the laws of atomic physics to the study of the temperature and density of stellar bodies and to conclude that hydrogen and helium, the two lightest elements, were also the two.
Prompted by this Facebook post, I have been reading about astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who should be more widely known than she is.From a piece last year in Cosmos:. Cecilia Payne, born on May 10, 1900, in Wendover, England, began her scientific career in 1919 with a scholarship to Cambridge University, where she studied physics.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin is a perfect example. An elected member of the Royal Astronomical Society while still studying at Cambridge University, and the first person to posit the idea that the primary composition of stars was helium and hydrogen (the two lightest elements), her dissertation was shunned by the leading scientists of her day, purely because it contradicted the paradigms of her era.
Accomplishments: Cecilia decided to move to the United States to pursue her doctoral degree and became the first person to receive a doctorate in astronomy from Radcliffe College, which was the all-female counterpart to Harvard College. Her PhD thesis found that the sun’s composition differs from the earth’s, and that stars are mainly composed of hydrogen and helium and was called.