Ceilia Payne

Ceilia Payne

Born: May 10, 1900, Wendover, UK

Died: December 7, 1979, Cambridge, MA

 

Cecilia Helena Payne was a British-American astrophysicist who discovered the composition of stars. In her 1925 doctoral thesis she proposed that stars were composed mostly of hydrogen and helium. This assertion was initially rejected by her peers who contended that the Sun and Earth were made of the same stuff. She was eventually proved correct, but not before someone else had used her findings and published it as his own. We now understand that stars are the source of the elements that make our universe and are manufactured within the stars from hydrogen and helium by nuclear fusion.

Cecilia was born into a prosperous family in England, one of three children. Her father was a barrister who had been an Oxford Fellow. Her mother’s family were Prussian. Sadly, her father died when she was only four years old, and her mother had to raise the family on her own. At school she preferred to study science, and in 1919 she won a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge. It was here that she attended a lecture by Arthur Eddington on his study of an eclipse that he claimed proved Einstein’s general relativity. She found this result inspiring. She completed her studies but was not awarded a degree because Cambridge University did not award degrees to women at that time.

Payne realized that her career choices were restricted to teaching unless she could find a way to finance her research in astronomy. She sought out grants that would allow her to move to the USA. In 1923 she gained an appointment at the Harvard College Observatory in the newly formed graduate program in astronomy. She was persuaded by Harlow Shapely, the director, to pursue a Ph.D. in astronomy. In 1925 she became the first person to receive a Ph.D. from Radcliffe College of Harvard University.

Her thesis presented her results of her studies of the composition of the atmosphere of the sun.  Her results showed that although the sun contained the elements that were typically found on Earth, in agreement with the conventional wisdom of the day, it was composed mostly of hydrogen and helium.

When Payne’s dissertation was reviewed, Henry Russell, a pre-eminent astronomer of the day dissuaded her from concluding that the composition of the Sun was predominantly hydrogen because it would contradict the scientific consensus of the time that the elemental composition of the Sun and the Earth were similar. In 1914, he had written in an academic article presenting this conclusion. Russell consequently described her results as “spurious”.

A few years later Russell realized she was correct when he derived the same results by different means. In 1929, he published his findings in a paper that briefly acknowledged Payne’s earlier work and discovery. Nevertheless, he was generally credited for the conclusions she had reached four years prior.

In 1933, on a visit to Germany, she met her future husband astronomer Sergey Gaposchkin. They married in 1934. They had three children, two boys and a girl. Her daughter is quoted as remembering her mother “an inspired seamstress, an inventive knitter, and a voracious reader”. She taught Sunday school at a Unitarian church and was active with the Quakers.

Payne-Gaposchkin remained scientifically active throughout her life, spending her entire academic career at Harvard. When she began, women were barred from becoming professors at Harvard, so she spent years doing less prestigious, low-paid research jobs. Nevertheless, her work resulted in several published books, including The Stars of High Luminosity (1930), Variable Stars (1938) and Variable Stars and Galactic Structure (1954).

In 1956 she became the first woman to be promoted to full professor from within the faculty at Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She was appointed the Phillips Professor of Astronomy in 1958. Later, with her appointment to the Chair of the Department of Astronomy, she also became the first woman to head a department at Harvard.

Shortly before her death she self-published her autobiography that was later reprinted as Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections. She died at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 7, 1979, aged 79.