Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Shannon Tobin
November 28, 2016
Astronomy
Professor Weiss

Presentation Paper

My partner and I are doing our presentation on Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. She was born
May 10, 1900 in Wendover, Bukinghamshire. Her mothers name was Emma Helena and her
fathers name was Edward Payne. Emma came from a Prussian family and had two
accomplished uncles. One of them was a historian, George Pertz, and the other was a writer,
James Wilkinson. Cecilias father died when she was only four years old. She met her husband,
Sergei Gaposchkin in a European tour in 1933 and helped him get a visa to the United States.
Sergei was born in Russia and was an astrophysicist. Cecilia and Sergei were married in March
1934.

She went to St. Pauls Girls School in 1919 and later got a scholarship to Cambridge
University. While she was there she read botany, physics, and chemistry and it wasnt until she
attended a lecture from Arthur Eddington when he talked about his expedition to Principe in the
Gulf of Guinea to observe and photograph the stars near a solar eclipse. She finished her studies
but was not given a degree since Cambridge did not offer degrees to women until 1948. She

looked for opportunities to move to the United States so that she could get a degree. She left
England in 1923 and moved to the United States and began to go to Harvard. In 1925 she
became the first person to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College which is now a part
of Harvard.

In her doctoral dissertation her thesis was Stellar Atmospheres, A Contribution to the
Observational Study of High Temperature in the Revising Layers of Stars. A lot of people
thought that this was the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy. She was able to
relate the spectral classes of stars to their temperatures by applying the ionization theory that
Meghnad Saha developed. She showed that the great variation in stellar absorption lines wasnt
because of different amounts of elements, that was originally thought, but instead it was because
of different amounts of ionization at different temperatures. She found that silicon, carbon, and
other common metals were present in the Suns spectrum and was about the same amounts as on
Earth, but, found that helium and hydrogen were way more abundant, especially hydrogen.

Astronomer Henry Russell told her not to present her conclusion because it went against
the accepted wisdom at the time. But, changed his mind four years later after he got the same
results and actually published his work and conclusion. Russell is often given all the credit for
the discovery even after Paynes work was accepted.

After she got her doctorate degree she began to study stars with high luminosity to
understand the structure of the Milky Way. She mad over 1,250,000 observations with her

assistants studying variable stars. Later the work went into the category of Magellanic Clouds
that added another 2,000,000 observations of variable stars. She published her second book in
1930 called Stars of High Luminosity with her conclusions.

She remained very active throughout her life and spent her entire academic career
in Harvard. She did think about leaving Harvard though because she served as a technical
assistant which gave her a low status and low salary. In 1938, however, she was given the title
astronomer, though later she asked to change her title to Philips Astronomer. In 1943 she was
elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She did teach classes in
Harvard and many of her pupils went on to become great astronomers but her teachings werent
recorded until 1945. In 1956 she became the first women to be a full time professor from within
the faculty and was appointed that position by the new director of Harvard, Donald Menzel. She
also became the first head women to a department in Harvard.

Bibliography
W. (2016, October 26). Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. Retrieved November 28, 2016,
from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Payne-Gaposchkin
S. (Director). (2014, October 7). Great Minds of Astronomy: Cecilia PayneGaposchkin [Video file]. In Youtube. Retrieved November 28, 2016, from
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_qF-jTY2zY