Do you know what the main elements of
our Sun are? It's hydrogen in the first
place, followed by helium. And this is not
only the case for our Sun but all the
other billions of trillions of stars in
the universe. But do you also know the
person behind these groundbreaking
scientific findings?
it was Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin and
as unusual as her name was her story of
discovering the gases that make up
almost our entire universe. Payne was
born on May 10th 1900 in the small town of Wendover and
raised by her single mother as her
father died at the age of four.
Graduating from high school in 1919, she
received a scholarship to study science
at the University of Cambridge and there
she attended a lecture of the famous
astronomer Arthur Eddington that sparked
her interest in astronomy.
So she dedicated herself to the science
of the stars. However, after finishing her
studies, she was not given a degree
because Cambridge University did not
grant them to women until 1948. Realising
her limited opportunities in England, she
decided to move to the US where she
entered a program for the promotion of
women at the Harvard College Observatory,
and finally she received the first-ever
PhD in astronomy at Harvard in 1925. Her
dissertation "Stellar Atmospheres" showed
that the spectral classes of stars were
caused by the temperature. She was able
to link the missing colours in the sun's
spectrum to certain elements and found
out that common metals like carbon made
up relatively the same amount as on Earth, but hydrogen and helium the vastly
more abundant which led her to the
conclusion that stars were primarily
composed of these two elements making
them the most abundant elements in the
universe.
However, the Princeton professor and
astronomer Henry Norris Russel asked her to
omit these results from her thesis as
they were contradicting conventional
views. He changed his mind when he came
to the same conclusion with different means in 1929. And guess what? He got all
the credit! Later on Payne became the
first female professor for astronomy at
Harvard. In the aftermath, her PhD thesis
was called "undoubtedly the most
brilliant PhD thesis ever written in
astronomy".
