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The astronomer who discovered what stars are made of almost went unrecognized for her work

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin wrote "the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy" but encountered roadblock after roadblock due to gender bias.

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Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was the first to discover that stars were primarily hydrogen and helium.

If you asked an average person to name influential astronomers in history, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin likely wouldn't be among them. But there's an argument to be made that she should be a household name. She's the reason we know what stars are made of, but gender bias nearly kept the astrophysicist from gaining the recognition she deserved.

When 25-year-old Cecilia Payne put forth her thesis saying that stars were mostly hydrogen and helium in 1925, it went against the scientific consensus that stars were composed of the same elements as planets. Her breakthrough research proved that hydrogen, the simplest atom, was one of the most fundamental building blocks of the entire cosmos—a foundational fact that informs space research to this day. So why isn't she more familiar to us?

A gifted scientist from childhood

Payne-Gaposchkin proved to be a gifted scientist from an early age, and her parents made sure she had the best science education they could provide in her home country of England. At 19, she entered University of Cambridge on scholarship and soon fell in love with physics. But women in science were expected to study botany, and she soon found herself being humiliated as the only woman in a physics class taught by Nobel Prize winner Ernest Rutherford, a renowned pioneer in atomic and nuclear studies. “At every lecture [Rutherford] would gaze at me pointedly…and would begin in his stentorian voice: 'Ladies and gentlemen,'" she wrote in her autobiography. "All the boys regularly greeted this witticism with thunderous applause [and] stamping with their feet…at every lecture I wished I could sink into the earth. To this day I instinctively take my place as far back as possible in a lecture room.”

She found a more supportive mentor in astrophysicist Arthur Eddington, but even he told her she wouldn't have opportunities in England as a female astronomer after she finished at Cambridge. He did, however, offer her a glowing recommendation to work with Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard College Observatory, who was starting up a graduate studies program. In 1923, Payne moved to the U.S. to continue her studies at Harvard.

A brilliant thesis thwarted

However, she faced limitations due to her sex there as well. Women played a significant role at Harvard, largely in the role of human computers. In analyzing spectral data that Harvard computers had painstakingly collected and organized, Payne-Gaposchkin discovered that spectra from ionized atoms, like those in the hot outer atmosphere of stars, differed from neutral atoms of the same kind. Combining what she gleaned from her data analysis with a previously untested theory from Indian physicist Meghnad Saha, she produced her thesis, Stellar Atmospheres.

a group of women working at harvard in 1925Cecilia Payne (top row, second from the left) with other women working at Harvard in 1925Harvard University Archives

Part of her thesis was well-received, but the part in which she discovered helium was 1000 times more abundant and hydrogen was 1,000,000 times more abundant in the stars than previously thought hit a bump. Princeton Observatory director Henry Russell, an outside examiner of her thesis, thought the idea that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen simply couldn't be true. "It is clearly impossible that hydrogen should be a million times more abundant than the metals,” he wrote to her. She would not be able to have her thesis accepted without Russell signing off on it, so she did was she felt she must. In her final draft, she wrote, “The enormous abundance derived for [hydrogen and helium] is almost certainly not real,” essentially disowning that part of her research result.

Proven right but without recognition

Ironically, Russell himself would prove her right just a few years later. In 1929, Russell published his own research, which had the same conclusion as Payne-Gaposhckin's but by a different method. He cited Payne-Gaposchkin’s work, noting that his results agreed with hers. However, he did not state that he had originally rejected her (correct) thesis. Later, Payne-Gaposhckin expressed regret at waffling on her findings. "I was to blame for not having pressed my point," she wrote in her autobiography. "I had given in to Authority when I believed I was right…I note it here as a warning to the young. If you are sure of your facts, you should defend your position.”

Payne-Gaposhckin continued research work and taught graduate courses, though she wasn't given the title of "professor" or even "instructor." Officially, she was Shapley's "technical assistant." When Shapley approached the dean and president of Harvard to have that changed, both refused. The president, Abbot Lawrence Lowell, said that Miss Payne “would never have a position in the University as long as he was alive."

Roadblock after roadblock simply because she was a woman

The biases against Payne-Gaposhckin as a woman stymied her again and again, but she persevered in her life's work. She technically earned the first Ph.D. in astronomy at Harvard, but it was officially awarded by Radcliffe, the women's college because Harvard's physics department chair refused to accept a woman candidate. She was paid poorly for her work and wasn't given any titles or positions that a man of her ability and qualifications would have been given. When Shapley launched the full department of astronomy at Harvard, he wanted Payne-Gaposchkin—his best researcher—to serve as its first chair, but he knew Lowell wouldn't allow it, so she was passed over for a male astronomer.

Despite teaching and researching, writing books and hundreds of papers, it would be three decades before Payne-Gaposchkin's contributions to astrophysics were recognized. She basically had to wait for the men with strong anti-woman biases to step down or retire and for men who saw and honored her brilliance to give her the recognition she had rightfully earned.

Finally a full professor and department chair

On June 21, 1956, The New York Times reported, “Harvard University announced today the appointment of Dr. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin as Professor of Astronomy. She is the first woman to attain full professorship at Harvard through regular faculty promotion.” A few months later, she also became the first woman to head a department at Harvard as she became chair of the astronomy department. And a few years later, in 1960, distinguished astronomer Otto Struve referred to Payne-Gaposchkin's Stellar Atmospheres as “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”

closeup of the sunThe sun and other stars are primarily made of hydrogen and helium.Photo credit: Canva

Perhaps most impressive is that, through all of her hard work and continuous road blocks due to her gender, Payne-Gaposchkin managed to marry a fellow astronomer and raise three children. As physicist and author Sidney Perkowitz writes in Physics World writes in Physics World:

"In some sense, one might say she 'had it all' in combining science with family and children, but getting there was unnecessarily difficult and gruelling because of bias against women. She became a full professor only at age 56, much later than a man with similar achievements would have reached that status, and after being passed over for advancement, which must have taken a psychological toll. Only a person with exceptional drive and persistence, along with scientific ability, could have endured until final recognition."

In 1976, three years before she died, the American Astronomical Society awarded Payne-Gaposchkin the prestigious Henry Norris Russell Prize. In her acceptance lecture, she said, “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.”

Thank you, Dr. Payne-Gaposchkin, for not only being the first person on Earth to see what stars are made of, but for doing so in the face of all the obstacles unnecessarily placed in your path.

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Heroes

This is a 'transit visibility zone.' Aliens living in it might be able to see us.

For centuries, human beings have looked at the night sky, hoping to see aliens.

Now, a group of scientists is trying to find out where aliens would have to be in order to see us.

Researchers from universities in the U.K. and Germany have identified nine planets that are "ideally placed" for their resident astronomers to detect Earth using the same methods Earth stargazers use to detect them, according to a new paper published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

The astronomers looked for planets on which observers could view Earth's transit across the sun — the period where, from their perspective, our planet moves in front of its home star, causing it to dim slightly.

An illustration of where an extraterrestrial observer would have to be to notice one of the planets in our solar system passing in front of the sun. Image by 2MASS/A. Mellinger/R. Wells.

The study builds on the work of astrophysicist Rene Heller, who proposed the idea that intelligent extraterrestrial life located in these "transit visibility zones" might already know about Earth in a paper published last year in the journal Astrobiology.

"We've expanded on this by including all of the solar system planets and looking at the known and expected exoplanets in these regions," study lead author Robert Wells, a Queen's University Belfast Ph.D. student, says.

The work was made possible by the revival of the Kepler space telescope, which malfunctioned and was nearly left for dead in 2013.

Instead, engineers used sunlight pressure to stabilize the stellar eye later that year. It has since discovered more than 500 exoplanets — joining the more than 2,300 total detected in the telescope's eight-year run.

A digital illustration of a gas giant planet and moon discovered by Kepler. Photo by NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt via Getty Images.

The next challenge? Finding where ET might actually be listening for that call.

None of the planets identified in the paper have the conditions to support life. The researchers expect to discover more worlds in the prime Earth-viewing zone in the coming months.

"Our hope is to find some planets which are potentially habitable and can see transits of Earth, which I think will be the best targets for SETI," Wells says.

Here's hoping when do we track our galactic neighbors down, they're not the kind we need Will Smith to deal with.

(Thankfully, we have Will Smith — just in case.)

Heroes

In 1437, Korean scientists watched a star go nova. Modern scientists finally found it.

As any historian of medieval East Asia or player of Civilization V: Brave New World will tell you, 15th century Koreans were really, really, really good at science.

[rebelmouse-image 19475372 dam="1" original_size="700x467" caption="A statue of King Sejong the Great in Seoul. Thanks, guy! Photo by Republic of Korea/Flickr." expand=1]A statue of King Sejong the Great in Seoul. Thanks, guy! Photo by Republic of Korea/Flickr.

Under the judicious rule of Sejong the Great, the kingdom's top researchers spent a lot of time looking at space and making maps of it.

In 1437, during one of these looking sessions, a bunch of scientists thought they discovered a bright new star, one that easily outshone everything else in the sky (eat it, Luyten 726-8A).

14 days later, it disappeared.

Unbeknownst to the ancient sky-watchers, the "new star" was not new at all. It was, instead, what's known as a "classical nova" — an ultra-dense, white dwarf star that sucks so much matter off a neighboring star it causes a giant, nuclear explosion. The star gets super bright for a short period of time before once again fading into the cosmic background — like a stellar version of Pokémon GO.

The problem is, 15th century Korean scientists didn't exactly keep the best records. For starters, it was the 15th century, and pretty much everyone had rickets. Also, the modern Korean alphabet wouldn't be invented for another seven years.

You'll be shocked to learn the location of the star that went nova was lost to time.

Until now.

After 580 years of searching, a team of researchers from four continents has finally located the star, making it the oldest such nova to have its location accurately documented.

Lead researcher Michael Shara had spent nearly 30 years looking for remnants of the stellar explosion, known as Nova Scorpii. (A great name for any Dutch speed metal band that might be looking, btw. Don't sleep on it!)  

Shara told The Atlantic's Marina Kornen that attempting to locate the site had been like "searching for a needle in a billion haystacks." Initially, the American Museum of Natural History curator and his team believed they'd find the nova between two stars in the constellation Scorpio. With the aid of online astronomical catalogs, which weren't a thing the first time Shara looked back in the 1980s, the astronomers combed through records of hundreds of millions of stars until, eventually, they focused in on a planetary nebula near the original search area.

In a classic "That's no moon, it's a space station" moment, the team rapidly realized that the nebula was the nova — or at least the remnants of it. They had been looking between the wrong two stars the entire time.

The team published its findings in the August edition of Nature.

"When we relaxed our criteria as to where to look in the constellation, we found the nova in 90 minutes," Shara told Space.com.

Image by K. Ilkiewicz and J. Mikolajewska.

This 2016 image, taken by a telescope in Chile, shows the star — indicated by two long, red hashmarks — surrounded by the cloud of hydrogen it ejected in 1437. The smaller red "plus sign" in the center shows the star's location at the time it went nova almost six centuries ago.

Thanks to research by Shara and others, we know a lot more about novas than we did in 1437 — and even more now that Nova Scorpii has been tracked down.

In addition to classical novas, astronomers have observed frequent "dwarf novas" — much smaller explosions — across the visible universe. Shara has long suspected that both types of novae arise from the same star systems at different points in time rather than from different systems altogether.

Images from the 1930s and '40s, published in the paper, show the star pair that produced the 1437 nova undergoing a series of dwarf novae — lending Shara's theory some weighty backup.

Whether you specifically care about the dynamics of matter exchange in binary star systems of not, it's hard to deny that — holy crap — this is amazing.

[rebelmouse-image 19475374 dam="1" original_size="700x364" caption="Image by tyrogthegatekeeper/Wikimedia Commons." expand=1]Image by tyrogthegatekeeper/Wikimedia Commons.

When those 15th century Korean astronomers looked at the sky, they knew they were witnessing something important about their universe.

With the right tools, some tenacity, and a bit of luck, human beings have made it possible to find out what that is. Even after a 600-year search.

Science, then, as now, totally rules.

Heroes

Astronomer Vera Rubin passed away Sunday. You should know about her if you don't.

Astronomer Vera Rubin passed away Dec. 25, 2016, at the age of 88.

Vera Rubin. Photo by Carnegie Institution of Washington.

Rubin was a pioneer in her field — one of the few prominent women astronomers of her time, who, in an era of oppressive professional sexism, uncovered some of the best evidence of the existence of dark matter — the mysterious stuff that we can't see that binds the universe together.

In addition to contributing to one of the major scientific discoveries of the 20th century, she was also a no-nonsense badass who fought for gender equality in her field from the beginning of the career to the end of her life.

Here are just a few of the ways she showed up:

1. She was blunt about the problems women faced in science — and knew exactly where to place the blame.

Rubin (second from left) with colleagues at the Women in Astronomy and Space Science Conference. Photo by NASA.

According to her NPR obituary, Rubin was fantastically upfront about the injustice and institutionalized misogyny that kept women out of jobs in STEM fields, noting that Rubin carried three basic assumptions with her at all times:

"(1) There is no problem in science that can be solved by a man that cannot be solved by a woman.

(2) Worldwide, half of all brains are in women.

(3) We all need permission to do science, but, for reasons that are deeply ingrained in history, this permission is more often given to men than to women."



Hard to argue with that.

2. She presented her graduate thesis to a room full of the most prominent astronomers in the world — while pregnant.

While in graduate school in the 1950s, Rubin discovered something anomalous about the space just outside our cosmic neighborhood — a region that was more densely packed with galaxies than those that surrounded it.

But when her adviser suggested she present her findings to the American Astronomical Society, he offered to present it for her because Rubin was set to deliver her first child a month before the meeting and he assumed she would be too consumed with the demands of motherhood to attend.

"Oh, I can go,'" she said matter-of-factly. And go she did.

She stumped her way through the presentation, where her work was largely dismissed by the review panel of accomplished, skeptical male scientists (and never published). Years later, however, astronomers confirmed the significance of her findings: Rubin had discovered the super-galactic plane, the "belt" around the supercluster of galaxies that includes the Milky Way — without anyone, including her, realizing it.

3. She once integrated the bathrooms at an all-male observatory by force.

"No girls allowed. Nah nah Pbbbbffffbbbtt." Photo by Coneslayer/Wikimedia Commons.

Early in her career, Rubin was invited to observe at Caltech's Palomar Observatory — the first woman ever allowed to work inside the testosterone-laden facility. The observatory was such a boys club that there was no ladies room on the premises.

"She went to her room, she cut up paper into a skirt image, and she stuck it on the little person image on the door of the bathroom," Neta Bahcall, a former colleague, told Astronomy Magazine in a June 2016 interview. "She said, 'There you go; now you have a ladies’ room.'"

4. She never won the Nobel Prize, and despite the many outraged on her behalf, she didn't really care.

No woman has won the Nobel Prize in physics for over 50 years — not due, according to many professionals in the field, to lack of qualified candidates, of whom Rubin was the most prominent.

Rubin, however, was dismissive of the snub as she felt her work spoke for itself.

"Fame is fleeting," Rubin said, in a 1990 interview with Discover Magazine. "My numbers mean more to me than my name. If astronomers are still using my data years from now, that's my greatest compliment."

5. She was only active on Twitter for one day — and used that time to tell girls who love science to ignore the haters.

An OECD study from 2015 found that girls equaled or outperformed boys in school performance in most countries but expressed lower confidence in their math abilities.  

On Feb. 3, 2016, Vera Rubin signed on to Twitter. She tweeted this:

She signed off the social media site for good shortly after but not before tweeting one final look at the cosmos — a simulated image of all the dark matter in the universe a short time after the Big Bang.

Because of Rubin, we can do more than admire the beauty of the universe; we can start to break down the mystery piece by piece, layer by layer. And we can do it no matter who we are, where we come from, or however many barriers stand in our way.

Rest in peace.

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