The Woman Who Wrote The ‘Most Brilliant Ph.D. Thesis In Astronomy’

I read a fair amount of biographical works about Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin lately, and I made myself familiar with her scientific work too. Of course, I encountered plenty of her ideas during my scientific quest, but I did not know much about their creator.

First of all, she was a ‘she.’ She was a woman in science when women were far from anything related to science. Not that they weren’t capable. It was because they weren’t allowed to do it. It is hard for me, and I can say that about most of us, imagine such a world, a world where women were treated as they were. Even more shocking, it is hard to imagine that such a world existed just 100 years ago. This shows us, again, how much society can change in such a short time.

But was it Cecilia Payne’s fault that she was born then? Was it her fault for not having the chance to get into science and to do research? It wasn’t. Today, women would have asked themselves the same thing if it weren’t for brave women like her and a few others in the last century (Marie Curie, Chien Wu, Ada Lovelace, Emmy Noether, Vera Rubin, Lise Meitner, Rosalind Franklin, and others). We thank them for their contributions to science, and at the same time, for their courage to pursue science.

What is Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin credited with?

In her doctoral thesis, put forward in 1925, she proposed for the first time that stars may be made mainly of hydrogen and helium. Her work was initially rejected because it was against the believed idea that the Sun and the Earth were primarily made of approximately the same elements.

Her thesis was named “Stellar Atmospheres: A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars.” She was relating the spectral data from stars to their temperatures by applying Saha’s ionization theory. She found that helium and hydrogen were greatly abundant, concluding her thesis with the affirmation that hydrogen was the overwhelming constituent of stars. The statement is, of course, similar to saying that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the Universe, which is fairly right.

Her work saw a lot of angry responses, coming from significant astronomers of those days. One of the most angered scientists was Henry Norris Russell. Years later, he acknowledged his mistake.

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The story

 ‘The result was a complete transformation of my world picture. […] My world had been so shaken that I experienced something very like a nervous breakdown.’

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was in love with science. She fell in love with it from an early age. The quote mentioned comes from her years at Cambridge, where she won a scholarship to study. There she attended a lecture by Arthur Eddington, who was talking about his 1919 solar expedition. That, she said, sparked her interest in astronomy. However, even though she completed her years at Cambridge, she was never offered a degree because degrees weren’t offered to women in those days at Cambridge.

She left England in 1923, heading to Harvard to complete her graduate studies. She became the first woman of Harvard to receive a Ph.D. in astronomy. Cecilia Payne was restless. Her passion was breaking every limit. She once went for 72 hours without sleep, only working. Her character and determination were more than amazing.

“There followed months, almost a year as I remember, of utter bewilderment. Often I was in a state of exhaustion and despair, working all day and late into the night”, she said about the last period of her doctoral work.

Otto Struve, a Russian-American astronomer, described her thesis a few years later, saying that it is “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”

Her work didn’t end in 1925. It was only the start of her scientific life. After deciding to stay at Harvard, she continued studying high-temperature stars to understand the Milky Way structure. She later studied stars with brighter than the tenth magnitude and variable stars. Her work was later used to determine the paths in stars’ evolution.

In 1956, she became the first female professor at Harvard, and the first woman to hold a chair position there.

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The fight with gender

There is much to say about how she influenced the roads of women in science in general. But she wouldn’t have wanted us to talk about that, and that is because she, even if she saw it in every move she made, didn’t want to acknowledge that she is seen differently. She was definitely aware of how her gender shapes her career but never let that stop her. And more interestingly, she never considered herself a feminist. She just did her job. She just loved the stars.

Read more of Cecilia Payne

I do recommend reading her autobiography” “ThDyer’s’s Hand An Autobiograp” ”, and also I strongly encourage enthusiasts to read her more scientific books, namel” “The Stars of High Luminosi”y”, o” “Variable Sta”s”

Learn Astrophysics at Home:

Did you always want to learn how the universe works? Read our 30-article Basics of Astrophysics series absolutely free of cost. From the popular topics such as stars, galaxies, and black holes to the detailed concepts of the subject like the concept of magnitude, the Hertzsprung Russell diagram, redshift, etc., there is something for everyone in this series. All the articles are given here. Happy reading!

Bogdan Teodorescu

Author at ‘The Secrets Of The Universe’, I am a science student from Romania. I am also the founder of Astronomy Hub, an organization for popularizing astronomy and astrophysics. I love reading philosophy and literature, enjoy classical rock, blues, and watch movies.