Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

#47/100 in #100extraordinarywomen

It feels great when a friend reads something somewhere and remembers that it’s something you are following and forwards you a reference. It was a friend who suggested to me to read about Cecilia and I cannot be thankful enough.

Back when scientists believed that the sun is made out of heavy elements, a 25 year old student wrote a brilliant and revolutionary doctor's dissertation proving everyone wrong. It was the bright and talented Cecilia Payne, a British - American astronomer and astrophysicist who, in 1925, proposed in her PhD thesis an explanation for the composition of stars in terms of the relative abundances of hydrogen and helium.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was born in England. She is one of the few women that have successfully blazed into male dominated scientific community. Cecilia is one of the world’s most accomplished and successful astrologists. Her career in astrology helped many other women pursue a career in science. Her greatest achievement, however, is often overlooked as she was never given the proper credit for the same. Cecilia Payne managed to discover what the Sun was made of, as well as what other stars are made of. However, she was “robbed” of her achievement.

Cecilia Helena Payne was born on May 10, 1900 in Wendover, England. She was one of three children born to Emma Leonora Helena (née Pertz) and Edward John Payne, a London barrister, historian and accomplished musician. Cecilia's father died when she was four years old, forcing her mother to raise the family on her own.

She attended St Paul's Girls' School. In 1919, she won a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge University, where she read botany, physics, and chemistry. Here, she attended a lecture by Arthur Eddington on his 1919 expedition to the island of Principe in the Gulf of Guinea off the west coast of Africa to observe and photograph the stars near a solar eclipse as a test of Einstein's general theory of relativity. This sparked her interest in astronomy. At one open night for the public, Cecilia asked so many quality questions, that the staff of the university nicknamed her “The Professor”. She approached professor Eddington and told him she wants to be an astronomer and pursue a career in astrology. He invited her to use the observatory at the university, a move that opened many doors for her. She completed her studies, but was not awarded a degree because of her sex as Cambridge did not grant degrees to women until 1948.

Eddington encouraged her ambition, but she felt there were more opportunities for a woman to work in astronomy in the United States than in Britain, as the country was very strict towards woman in science. She realized that her only career option in the U.K. was to become a teacher, so she looked for grants that would enable her to move to the United States. After being introduced to Harlow Shapley, the Director of the Harvard College Observatory, who had just begun a graduate program in astronomy, she left England in 1923. This was made possible by a fellowship to encourage women to study at the observatory. The first student on the fellowship was Adelaide Ames (1922) and the second was Cecilia Payne. So, she moved to the United States and it was at Harvard that she achieved her greater success and flourished as an astronomer.

Beginning in the 1880s, astronomers at Harvard College such as Edward Pickering, Annie Jump Cannon, Williamina Fleming, and Antonia Maury had succeeded in classifying stars according to their spectra into seven types: O, B, A, F, G, K, and M. It was believed that this sequence corresponded to the surface temperature of the stars, with O being the hottest and M the coolest. In her PhD thesis (published as Stellar Atmospheres in 1925), Cecilia used the spectral lines of many different elements and the work of Indian astrophysicist Meghnad Saha, who had discovered an equation relating the ionization states of an element in a star to the temperature to definitively establish that the spectral sequence did correspond to quantifiable stellar temperatures. She also determined that stars are composed mostly of hydrogen and helium. However, she was dissuaded from this conclusion by astronomer Henry Norris Russell, who thought that stars would have the same composition as Earth. (Russell conceded in 1929 that Cecilia Payne was correct.) Cecilia received the first PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe College for her thesis, since Harvard did not grant doctoral degrees to women. Astronomers Otto Struve and Velta Zebergs later called her thesis “undoubtedly the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy.”

Cecilia remained at Harvard as a technical assistant to Shapley after completing her doctorate. Shapley had her discontinue her work with stellar spectra and encouraged her instead to work on photometry of stars by using photographic plates, even though more accurate brightness measurements could be made by using recently introduced photoelectric instruments. She later wrote, “I wasted much time on this account.…My change in field made the end of the decade a sad one.” During this period, however, she was able to continue her stellar spectral work with a second book, Stars of High Luminosity (1930), which paid particular attention to Cepheid variables and marked the beginning of her interest in variable stars and novae. In her career, Cecilia has surveyed all the stars that are brighter than the tenth magnitude. She has made more than 1,250,000 observations.

According to G. Kass-Simon and Patricia Farnes, Cecilia Payne's career marked a turning point at Harvard College Observatory. Under the direction of Harlow Shapley and Dr E. J. Sheridan (whom she has described as a mentor), the observatory had already offered more opportunities in astronomy to women than any other institution, and notable achievements had been made earlier in the century by Williamina Fleming, Antonia Maury, Annie Jump Cannon, and Henrietta Swan Leavitt. However, with Cecilia's PhD, women entered the ‘mainstream’. The trail she blazed into the largely male-dominated scientific community was an inspiration to many. For example, she became a role model for noted astrophysicist Joan Feynman. Joan's mother and grandmother had dissuaded her from pursuing science, since they believed women were not physically capable of understanding scientific concepts. But Joan was later inspired by Cecilia when she came across some of her work in an astronomy textbook. Seeing her research published in this way convinced Joan Feynman that she could, in fact, follow her scientific passions.

In 1933, Cecilia travelled to Europe to meet Russian astronomer Boris Gerasimovich, who had previously worked at the Harvard College Observatory and with whom she planned to write a book about variable stars. In Göttingen, Germany, she met Sergey Gaposchkin, a Russian astronomer who could not return to the Soviet Union because of his politics. She was able to find a position at Harvard for him. They married in 1934 and often collaborated on studies of variable stars. They settled in the historic town of Lexington, Massachusetts, a short commute from Harvard. They had three children, Edward, Katherine, and Peter. Her daughter remembers her as “an inspired seamstress, an inventive knitter, and a voracious reader.” She was named a lecturer in astronomy in 1938, but even though she taught courses, they were not listed in the Harvard catalogue until after World War II.

In 1956, Cecilia Payne was appointed a full professor at Harvard and became the first woman to be promoted to a full time professor at Harvard’s faculty of Arts and Science. She was later appointed to Chair of the Department of Astronomy, making her the first woman with a department at Harvard. Some of her more prominent students included Frank Drake, Helen Hogg, Paul W. Hodge and Joseph Ashbrook. All of them made significant contributions to the field of astronomy. She retired from teaching in 1966, but continued her research as a member of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. She also wrote an autobiography, The Dyer’s Hand, that was posthumously collected in Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections (1984). Her other printed works include academic books, namely, The Stars of High Luminosity (1930), Variable Stars (1938), Variable Stars and Galactic Structure (1954), Introduction to Astronomy (1956) and The Galactic Novae (1957). She passed away on December 7, 1979.

During her illustrious lifetime, she won numerous awards, like, the Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy in 1934 of which she was the first recipient; the award of Merit from Radcliffe College in 1952; and the Rittenhouse Medal from the Rittenhouse Astronomical Society at the Franklin Institute in 1961. She became an elected member of Royal Astronomical Society while still a student at Cambridge in 1923; a member of the American Philosophical Society in 1936; a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1943; an Emeritus Professor of Harvard University in 1967; and also won the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the American Astronomical Society in 1976. She was awarded many honorary degrees from Rutgers University, Wilson College, Smith College, Western College, Colby College, and the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania. Moreover, the Asteroid 2039 Payne-Gaposchkin was named after her.

In Cecilia Payne’s own words, “The reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something. Nothing can compare with that experience... The reward of the old scientist is the sense of having seen a vague sketch grow into a masterly landscape.” Let’s hope she continues to inspire all young minds, and not just of women, to continue to challenge what exists and never be afraid to fail. 

Source: Google search and Wikipedia.