WHAT AN IRONIC AWARD

Ever heard of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin? I had not until recently, when I saw a meme about her on the internet. Her story reminded me of Jocelyn Bell-Burnell’s. Both are woman whose efforts in advancing our scientific knowledge were ignored for decades.

Bell-Burnell discovered pulsars, marking a huge advancement in our ability to understand and measure the universe.

Contribution

But her contribution was overlooked, and instead it was her academic supervisor who was awarded a Nobel for what were largely her findings.
Payne-Gaposchkin was relegated to similar obscurity. Her contribution was to discover what stars are largely made of.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was born in England in 1900. She had the advantage of coming from a highly intellectual family, but the disadvantage that she was not well supported by them. Nevertheless, she was an excellent student, and in 1919 she won a scholarship to study at Cambridge, where she spent time on botany, chemistry and physics.

In 1923 Payne-Gaposchkin switched to Harvard in the United States, where she worked on the spectra of stars. By 1925 she completed her doctorate on the subject of stars’ atmospheres, writing a thesis that has been called ‘the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy’.

Proportions

She was the first person to earn a PhD in astronomy from Harvard University.
Her former university, Cambridge, simply refused to award women PhD degrees until as late as 1948.
One of the original key conclusions of Payne-Gaposchkin’s thesis was that the sun is made of the same elements we find here on Earth, and in relatively the same proportions, except for hydrogen and helium, which are up to a million times more abundant in the sun.

She was correct.
But her academic supervisor was the famous and powerful astronomer Henry Norris Russell. In a letter to her, he wrote, “You have some very striking results which appear to me, in general, to be remarkably consistent... (but) there remains one serious discrepency... it is clearly impossible that hydrogen should be a million times more abundant than the other elements.”

Monumental

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was persuaded by Russell to change her conclusions.
So far, no real foul. But then just four years later in 1929, this very same Henry Norris Russell published a 71-page scientific paper on the composition of the sun’s atmosphere. In this paper he concluded that the sun is largely made of hydrogen!

While he acknowledges Payne-Gaposchkin in his credits, he fails to tell the full truth of how she came to this monumental conclusion first as a student under him, and how he had convinced her not to publish the discovery.

In a final twist of irony, 50 years later in 1977, the American Astronomical Society awarded Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin the prestigious Henry Norris Russell Prize.
Since the 1920s, Russell has been credited with discovering the composition of stars. Only recently has the true story been revealed.

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