Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
Encyclopedia
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (May 10, 1900 – December 7, 1979) was an English
-American
astronomer
who in 1925 was first to show that the Sun
is mainly composed of hydrogen
, contradicting accepted wisdom at the time.
, England
to Elena (Pertz) and Edward John Payne, a London barrister, historian and accomplished musician. Cecilia Payne'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
and then won a scholarship to read botany
, physics
, and chemistry
at Newnham College, Cambridge University
in 1919. Here, her interest in astronomy was sparked by Eddington
's lecture on his eclipse expedition to Africa to photograph the stars near the eclipsed Sun as a test of Einstein's general theory of relativity.
She completed her studies, but was not awarded a degree as Cambridge did not grant degrees to women at that time. After meeting Harlow Shapley
, the Director of the Harvard College Observatory
, who had just begun a graduate program in astronomy, Cecilia Payne left England for the United States
in 1923. This was made possible by a fellowship to encourage women to study at the Observatory. The first student was Adelaide Ames (1922) and the second student was Payne.
in astronomy from Radcliffe (now part of Harvard
) for her thesis: "Stellar Atmospheres, A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars". Astronomer Otto Struve
characterized it as "undoubtedly the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy". By applying the ionization
theory developed by Indian physicist Megh Nad Saha she was able to accurately relate the spectral classes
of star
s to their actual temperatures. She showed that the great variation in stellar absorption lines
was due to differing amounts of ionization that occurred at different temperatures, and not due to the different abundances of elements. She correctly suggested that silicon, carbon, and other common metals
seen in the Sun were found in about the same relative amounts as on Earth, but that helium and particularly hydrogen were vastly more abundant (by about a factor of one million in the case of hydrogen). Her thesis thus established that hydrogen was the overwhelming constituent
of the stars. When her dissertation was reviewed, she was dissuaded by Henry Norris Russell
from concluding that the composition of the Sun is different from the Earth, which was the accepted wisdom at the time. However, Russell changed his mind four years later when other evidence emerged. After Payne-Gaposchkin was proven correct Russell was often given the credit.
in 1933, she met Russia
n-born Sergei I. Gaposchkin in Germany
. She helped him get a visa to the United States and they married in March 1934, and eventually had three children, Edward, Katherine, and Peter. Payne-Gaposchkin remained scientifically active throughout her life, spending her entire academic career at Harvard. She served as a technical assistant to Shapley from 1927 to 1938. At one point she considered leaving Harvard because of her low status and poor salary as she held no official position there. Shapley, however, made efforts to improve her position, and in 1938 she was given the title of "astronomer". On becoming director in 1954, Donald Menzel tried to improve her appointment, and 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. Later, with her appointment to the Chair of the Department of Astronomy, she also became the first woman to head a department at Harvard.
. Later, with her husband, she surveyed all the stars brighter than the tenth magnitude. She then studied variable star
s, making over 1,250,000 observations with her assistants. This work later was extended to the Magellanic Clouds
, adding a further 2,000,000 observations of variable stars. This data was used to determine the paths of stellar evolution
.
, Antonia Maury
, Annie Jump Cannon
, and Henrietta Leavitt. However, with Payne-Gaposchkin's Ph.D., women entered the 'mainstream'. The trail she blazed into the largely male-dominated scientific community was an inspiration to many.
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
-American
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
astronomer
Astronomer
An astronomer is a scientist who studies celestial bodies such as planets, stars and galaxies.Historically, astronomy was more concerned with the classification and description of phenomena in the sky, while astrophysics attempted to explain these phenomena and the differences between them using...
who in 1925 was first to show that the Sun
Sun
The Sun is the star at the center of the Solar System. It is almost perfectly spherical and consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic fields...
is mainly composed of hydrogen
Hydrogen
Hydrogen is the chemical element with atomic number 1. It is represented by the symbol H. With an average atomic weight of , hydrogen is the lightest and most abundant chemical element, constituting roughly 75% of the Universe's chemical elemental mass. Stars in the main sequence are mainly...
, contradicting accepted wisdom at the time.
Early life
Cecilia Helena Payne was one of three children born in WendoverWendover
Wendover is a market town that sits at the foot of the Chiltern Hills in Buckinghamshire, England. It is also a civil parish within Aylesbury Vale district...
, England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...
to Elena (Pertz) and Edward John Payne, a London barrister, historian and accomplished musician. Cecilia Payne'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
St Paul's Girls' School
St Paul's Girls' School is a senior independent school, located in Brook Green, Hammersmith, in West London, England.-History:In 1904 a new day school for girls was established by the trustees of the Dean Colet Foundation , which had run St Paul's School for boys since the sixteenth century...
and then won a scholarship to read botany
Botany
Botany, plant science, or plant biology is a branch of biology that involves the scientific study of plant life. Traditionally, botany also included the study of fungi, algae and viruses...
, physics
Physics
Physics is a natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force. More broadly, it is the general analysis of nature, conducted in order to understand how the universe behaves.Physics is one of the oldest academic...
, and chemistry
Chemistry
Chemistry is the science of matter, especially its chemical reactions, but also its composition, structure and properties. Chemistry is concerned with atoms and their interactions with other atoms, and particularly with the properties of chemical bonds....
at Newnham College, Cambridge University
University of Cambridge
The University of Cambridge is a public research university located in Cambridge, United Kingdom. It is the second-oldest university in both the United Kingdom and the English-speaking world , and the seventh-oldest globally...
in 1919. Here, her interest in astronomy was sparked by Eddington
Arthur Stanley Eddington
Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, OM, FRS was a British astrophysicist of the early 20th century. He was also a philosopher of science and a popularizer of science...
's lecture on his eclipse expedition to Africa to photograph the stars near the eclipsed Sun as a test of Einstein's general theory of relativity.
She completed her studies, but was not awarded a degree as Cambridge did not grant degrees to women at that time. After meeting Harlow Shapley
Harlow Shapley
Harlow Shapley was an American astronomer.-Career:He was born on a farm in Nashville, Missouri, and dropped out of school with only the equivalent of a fifth-grade education...
, the Director of the Harvard College Observatory
Harvard College Observatory
The Harvard College Observatory is an institution managing a complex of buildings and multiple instruments used for astronomical research by the Harvard University Department of Astronomy. It is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, and was founded in 1839...
, who had just begun a graduate program in astronomy, Cecilia Payne left England for the United States
United States
The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
in 1923. This was made possible by a fellowship to encourage women to study at the Observatory. The first student was Adelaide Ames (1922) and the second student was Payne.
Doctorate
Shapley persuaded Cecilia Payne to write a doctoral dissertation, and so in 1925 she became the first person to earn a Ph.D.Ph.D.
A Ph.D. is a Doctor of Philosophy, an academic degree.Ph.D. may also refer to:* Ph.D. , a 1980s British group*Piled Higher and Deeper, a web comic strip*PhD: Phantasy Degree, a Korean comic series* PhD Docbook renderer, an XML renderer...
in astronomy from Radcliffe (now part of Harvard
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...
) for her thesis: "Stellar Atmospheres, A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars". Astronomer Otto Struve
Otto Struve
Otto Struve was a Russian astronomer. In Russian, his name is sometimes given as Otto Lyudvigovich Struve ; however, he spent most of his life and his entire scientific career in the United States...
characterized it as "undoubtedly the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy". By applying the ionization
Ionization
Ionization is the process of converting an atom or molecule into an ion by adding or removing charged particles such as electrons or other ions. This is often confused with dissociation. A substance may dissociate without necessarily producing ions. As an example, the molecules of table sugar...
theory developed by Indian physicist Megh Nad Saha she was able to accurately relate the spectral classes
Stellar classification
In astronomy, stellar classification is a classification of stars based on their spectral characteristics. The spectral class of a star is a designated class of a star describing the ionization of its chromosphere, what atomic excitations are most prominent in the light, giving an objective measure...
of star
Star
A star is a massive, luminous sphere of plasma held together by gravity. At the end of its lifetime, a star can also contain a proportion of degenerate matter. The nearest star to Earth is the Sun, which is the source of most of the energy on Earth...
s to their actual temperatures. She showed that the great variation in stellar absorption lines
Spectral line
A spectral line is a dark or bright line in an otherwise uniform and continuous spectrum, resulting from a deficiency or excess of photons in a narrow frequency range, compared with the nearby frequencies.- Types of line spectra :...
was due to differing amounts of ionization that occurred at different temperatures, and not due to the different abundances of elements. She correctly suggested that silicon, carbon, and other common metals
Metallicity
In astronomy and physical cosmology, the metallicity of an object is the proportion of its matter made up of chemical elements other than hydrogen and helium...
seen in the Sun were found in about the same relative amounts as on Earth, but that helium and particularly hydrogen were vastly more abundant (by about a factor of one million in the case of hydrogen). Her thesis thus established that hydrogen was the overwhelming constituent
Metallicity
In astronomy and physical cosmology, the metallicity of an object is the proportion of its matter made up of chemical elements other than hydrogen and helium...
of the stars. When her dissertation was reviewed, she was dissuaded by Henry Norris Russell
Henry Norris Russell
Henry Norris Russell was an American astronomer who, along with Ejnar Hertzsprung, developed the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram . In 1923, working with Frederick Saunders, he developed Russell–Saunders coupling which is also known as LS coupling.-Biography:Russell was born in 1877 in Oyster Bay, New...
from concluding that the composition of the Sun is different from the Earth, which was the accepted wisdom at the time. However, Russell changed his mind four years later when other evidence emerged. After Payne-Gaposchkin was proven correct Russell was often given the credit.
Personal life
Payne became an American citizen in 1931. On a tour through EuropeEurope
Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
in 1933, she met Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...
n-born Sergei I. Gaposchkin in Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
. She helped him get a visa to the United States and they married in March 1934, and eventually had three children, Edward, Katherine, and Peter. Payne-Gaposchkin remained scientifically active throughout her life, spending her entire academic career at Harvard. She served as a technical assistant to Shapley from 1927 to 1938. At one point she considered leaving Harvard because of her low status and poor salary as she held no official position there. Shapley, however, made efforts to improve her position, and in 1938 she was given the title of "astronomer". On becoming director in 1954, Donald Menzel tried to improve her appointment, and 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. Later, with her appointment to the Chair of the Department of Astronomy, she also became the first woman to head a department at Harvard.
Later research
After her doctorate, Payne then studied stars of high luminosity in order to understand the structure of the Milky WayMilky Way
The Milky Way is the galaxy that contains the Solar System. This name derives from its appearance as a dim un-resolved "milky" glowing band arching across the night sky...
. Later, with her husband, she surveyed all the stars brighter than the tenth magnitude. She then studied variable star
Variable star
A star is classified as variable if its apparent magnitude as seen from Earth changes over time, whether the changes are due to variations in the star's actual luminosity, or to variations in the amount of the star's light that is blocked from reaching Earth...
s, making over 1,250,000 observations with her assistants. This work later was extended to the Magellanic Clouds
Magellanic Clouds
The two Magellanic Clouds are irregular dwarf galaxies visible in the southern hemisphere, which are members of our Local Group and are orbiting our Milky Way galaxy...
, adding a further 2,000,000 observations of variable stars. This data was used to determine the paths of stellar evolution
Stellar evolution
Stellar evolution is the process by which a star undergoes a sequence of radical changes during its lifetime. Depending on the mass of the star, this lifetime ranges from only a few million years to trillions of years .Stellar evolution is not studied by observing the life of a single...
.
Appraisal of her career
According to G. Kass-Simon and Patricia Farnes, Payne's career marked a sort of turning point at Harvard College Observatory. Under the direction of Harlow Shapley, the observatory had already offered more opportunities in astronomy to women than other institutions, and notable achievements had been made earlier in the century by Williamina FlemingWilliamina Fleming
-External links:* * * * from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific- Obituaries :*...
, Antonia Maury
Antonia Maury
Antonia Caetana de Paiva Pereira Maury was an American astronomer who published an important early catalog of stellar spectra.-Early life:Antonia Maury was born in Cold Spring, New York...
, Annie Jump Cannon
Annie Jump Cannon
Annie Jump Cannon was an American astronomer whose cataloging work was instrumental in the development of contemporary stellar classification. With Edward C...
, and Henrietta Leavitt. However, with Payne-Gaposchkin's Ph.D., women entered the 'mainstream'. The trail she blazed into the largely male-dominated scientific community was an inspiration to many.
Books
She published several books including:- "Stars of High Luminosity" (1930),
- "Variable Stars" (1938),
- "Variable Stars and Galactic Structure" (1954),
- "Introduction to Astronomy" (1956),
- "The Galactic Novae" (1957),
- "Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: an autobiography and other recollections" (1984) ed. Katherine Haramundanis
Honors
Awards- Elected member of Royal Astronomical SocietyRoyal Astronomical SocietyThe Royal Astronomical Society is a learned society that began as the Astronomical Society of London in 1820 to support astronomical research . It became the Royal Astronomical Society in 1831 on receiving its Royal Charter from William IV...
while still a student at Cambridge 1923 - Annie J. Cannon Award in AstronomyAnnie J. Cannon Award in AstronomyThe Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy is awarded annually by the American Astronomical Society to a woman resident of North America, who is within five years of receipt of a Ph.D., for distinguished contributions to astronomy or for similar contributions in related sciences which have immediate...
(1934) - first recipient - Member of the American Philosophical SocietyAmerican Philosophical SocietyThe American Philosophical Society, founded in 1743, and located in Philadelphia, Pa., is an eminent scholarly organization of international reputation, that promotes useful knowledge in the sciences and humanities through excellence in scholarly research, professional meetings, publications,...
(1936) - Member of the American Academy of Arts and SciencesAmerican Academy of Arts and SciencesThe American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...
(1943) - Emeritus Professor of Harvard University in 1967
- Henry Norris Russell LectureshipHenry Norris Russell LectureshipThe Henry Norris Russell Lectureship is awarded each year by the American Astronomical Society in recognition of a lifetime of excellence in astronomical research.-Previous lecturers:This list of lecturers is from the American Astronomical Society's website....
of the American Astronomical SocietyAmerican Astronomical SocietyThe American Astronomical Society is an American society of professional astronomers and other interested individuals, headquartered in Washington, DC...
(1976) - Rittenhouse Medal from the Franklin InstituteFranklin InstituteThe Franklin Institute is a museum in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and one of the oldest centers of science education and development in the United States, dating to 1824. The Institute also houses the Benjamin Franklin National Memorial.-History:On February 5, 1824, Samuel Vaughn Merrick and...
and the Award of Merit from Radcliffe CollegeRadcliffe CollegeRadcliffe College was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was the coordinate college for Harvard University. It was also one of the Seven Sisters colleges. Radcliffe College conferred joint Harvard-Radcliffe diplomas beginning in 1963 and a formal merger agreement with... - Honorary Degrees from Wilson CollegeWilson CollegeWilson College can refer to:* Wilson College , Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, USA* Warren Wilson College, Asheville, North Carolina, USA* Lindsey Wilson College, Kentucky, USA* Wilson College, Princeton University, New Jersey, USA...
, Smith CollegeSmith CollegeSmith College is a private, independent women's liberal arts college located in Northampton, Massachusetts. It is the largest member of the Seven Sisters...
, Western College, Colby CollegeColby CollegeColby College is a private liberal arts college located on Mayflower Hill in Waterville, Maine. Founded in 1813, it is the 12th-oldest independent liberal arts college in the United States...
, and the Women’s Medical College of Philadelphia - AsteroidAsteroidAsteroids are a class of small Solar System bodies in orbit around the Sun. They have also been called planetoids, especially the larger ones...
2039 Payne-Gaposchkin2039 Payne-Gaposchkin2039 Payne-Gaposchkin is a main belt asteroid with an orbital period of 2061.1576389 days . The asteroid was discovered on February 14, 1974, and was named for the astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin.-References:...
named after her
Quotation
- 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.
- —Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (accepting the Henry Norris Russell Prize from the American Astronomical Society)
Further reading
- Rubin, Vera (2006), "Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin" in OUT OF THE SHADOWS: Contributions of 20th Century Women to Physics, Nina Byers and Gary Williams, ed., Cambridge University Press (ISBN 978-0-521-82197-1 | ISBN 0-521-82197-5).
External links
- Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin in CWP at UCLA
- Harvard Square Library
- Biography
- Bibliography from the Astronomical Society of the PacificAstronomical Society of the PacificThe Astronomical Society of the Pacific is a scientific and educational organization, founded in San Francisco on February 7, 1889. Its name derives from its origins on the Pacific Coast, but today it has members all over the country and the world...
- Obituary - Physics Today 33 (1980) 64
- Obituary QJRAS 23 (1982) 450