Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin

Cecilia, Helena Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979)

Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin (née Payne; May 10, 1900 – December 7, 1979) was a British-born American astronomer and astrophysicist who proposed in her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Her groundbreaking conclusion was initially rejected because it contradicted the scientific wisdom of the time, which held that there were no significant elemental differences between the Sun and Earth. Independent observations eventually proved she was correct. Her work on the nature of variable stars, carried out with her husband, Sergei Gaposchkin, was foundational to modern astrophysics.

Cecilia Payne’s mother refused to spend money on her college education, so she won a scholarship to Cambridge.

Cecilia Payne completed her studies, but Cambridge wouldn’t give her a degree because at that time there was not much exposure for women, so she said to heck with that and moved to the United States to work at Harvard.

Cecilia Payne was the first person ever to earn a PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe College, with what Otto Strauve called “the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy.”

Not only did Cecilia Payne discover what the universe is made of, but she also discovered what the sun is made of (Henry Norris Russell, a fellow astronomer, is usually given credit for discovering that the sun’s composition is different from the Earth’s, but he came to his conclusions four years later than Payne—after telling her not to publish).

Cecilia Payne is the reason we know basically anything about variable stars (stars whose brightness as seen from earth fluctuates). Literally, every other study on variable stars is based on her work.

Cecilia Payne was the first woman to be promoted to full professor from within Harvard and is often credited with breaking the glass ceiling for women in the Harvard science department and in astronomy, as well as inspiring entire generations of women to take up science.