Women Scientists

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin 1900-1979

At a glance:

English astronomer who showed the sun is mainly composed of hydrogen

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was English by birth. She read natural sciences at Cambridge where her interest in astronomy was sparked. She won a Pickering Fellowship to study at the Harvard Observatory and moved to the US when she was 23. She was the first person, male or female, to be awarded a PhD in astronomy from Harvard with her dissertation being hailed as the most brilliant ever written in the field. She suggested that helium and especially hydrogen was the major constituent of the stars but was dissuaded from concluding it because her supervisor claimed it was impossible. Later she was proved right. She later studied stars of high luminosity. She married a Russian astronomer and they worked together developing data which was used to determine how stars evolved. She is regarded as a key figure in women's science because her trail blazing brought women scientists into the mainstream.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

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