Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (born Cecilia Helena Payne; – ) was a British-born American astronomer and astrophysicist. Her work on the cosmic makeup of the universe and the nature of variable stars was foundational to modern astrophysics.

She determined that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium in her 1925 doctoral thesis. because it contradicted the science of the time, which held that no significant elemental differences distinguished the Sun and Earth. Independent observations eventually proved that she was correct.

Despite completing her studies, because she was a woman Payne was not eligible to receive a degree from the University of Cambridge. Similarly in America, she was not eligible to receive a doctoral degree (PhD) for her studies at Harvard University, as the university did not grant doctoral degrees to women at the time. Instead, she received her doctoral degree from Radcliffe College

While she was a student at Cambridge, Payne was elected to the Royal Astronomical Society. Later, she became the first recipient of the American Astronomical Society’s prestigious Annie Jump Cannon Award in Astronomy. In 1956, she was the first woman appointed as a professor and as a department chair at Harvard.

Her work resulted in several published books, including The Stars of High Luminosity (1930), Variable Stars (1938), and Variable Stars and Galactic Structure (1954).

Early life

Cecilia Helena Payne, born in Wendover in Buckinghamshire, England, was one of three children born to Emma Leonora Helena (née Pertz), from an erudite Prussian family, and Edward John Payne, a London barrister. Her father was a historian and musician who had been an Oxford fellow. Payne had two distinguished uncles, historian Georg Heinrich Pertz and the Swedenborgian writer James John Garth Wilkinson. When Cecilia was four, her father died, leaving her mother to raise the family on her own.

Education

Payne began her formal education in Wendover at a private school run by Elizabeth Edwards. When Payne was twelve, her family moved to London to facilitate the education of her brother, Humfry; he later became an archaeologist. Payne initially attended St. Mary's College, Paddington, where study of mathematics or science was not available to her. In 1918, she transferred to St. Paul's Girls' School, where her music teacher, Gustav Holst, encouraged her to pursue a career in music. However, Payne decided to focus on science. The following year she won a scholarship covering her expenses at Newnham College, Cambridge University, where she studied physics and chemistry. She said of the lecture: "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." Although she completed her studies, she did not receive an official degree because Cambridge did not grant degrees to women until 1948.

Payne realized that her only career option in the U.K. was to become a teacher, so she looked for grants that would enable her to move to the United States. Leslie Comrie, then a PhD student at Cambridge University, introduced her to Harlow Shapley, the director of the Harvard College Observatory, after a lecture in London at the British Astronomical Association. A fellowship established to encourage women to study at the Harvard Observatory enabled Payne to move to the United States to study at Harvard College in 1923. Adelaide Ames had been the first recipient of this fellowship in 1922, with Payne following as the second.

Lawrence H. Aller later described Payne as one of the "most capable go-getters" in Shapley's observatory. She then studied related courses at Harvard via the program for women and Shapley persuaded Payne to write a doctoral dissertation on a topic in astronomy.

Doctoral thesis

250px|thumb|Ratios of hydrogen and helium measured in the [[Milky Way galaxy match Payne-Gaposchkin's 1925 calculations]]

In 1925, Payne became the first person to earn a doctoral degree (PhD) in astronomy from Radcliffe College of Harvard University.

While analyzing glass plates at the Harvard College Observatory, Russell, in a 1914 article, had argued that:

<blockquote>The agreement of the solar and terrestrial lists is such as to confirm very strongly Rowland's opinion that, if the Earth's crust should be raised to the temperature of the Sun's atmosphere, it would give a very similar absorption spectrum. The spectra of the Sun and other stars were similar, so it appeared that the relative abundance of elements in the universe was like that in Earth's crust.</blockquote>

Consequently, Russell described her scientific conclusion as "spurious". Although she included all calculations and results, Payne accommodated the criticism of her reviewer by including a statement in her thesis that her results were "almost certainly not real". yet Russell was generally credited for the conclusions Payne had reached four years prior.

Nearly 40 years after Payne's thesis was published, professional recognition of her discovery was given to her by astronomer Otto Struve when he described her work as "the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy".

On a tour through Europe in 1933, Payne met Russian-born astrophysicist in Germany. She helped him obtain a visa to the United States, where they married in March 1934.

Harlow Shapley (the Director of the Harvard College Observatory) had made efforts to improve her position, and in 1938 she was given the title of "Astronomer". In order to get approval for her title, Shapley had assured the university that giving Payne-Gaposchkin this position would not make her equivalent to a professor. Payne later requested that her title be changed to "Phillips Astronomer", an endowed position that would make her an "officer of the university" and Shapley pushed privately for the position to be converted into an explicit professorship as the "Phillips Professor of Astronomy".

Nonetheless, the courses she taught were not recorded as available in the Harvard University catalogue until 1945. She also supervised Helen Sawyer Hogg, Frank Kameny and Owen Gingerich.

Payne-Gaposchkin retired from active teaching in 1966 and subsequently, was appointed Professor Emerita of Harvard. She edited and published the lectures of Walter Baade, Evolution of Stars and Galaxies (1963).

Legacy

Payne-Gaposchkin's career marked a turning point at Harvard College Observatory. Under the direction of Harlow Shapley and Dr. E. J. Sheridan (whom Payne-Gaposchkin described as a mentor) the observatory already had offered more opportunities in astronomy to women than did other institutions. This was evident in the achievements accomplished earlier in the century by Williamina Fleming, Antonia Maury, Annie Jump Cannon, and Henrietta Swan Leavitt. However, with Payne's PhD, women entered the mainstream.

The trail she blazed into the largely male-dominated scientific community was an inspiration to many. For example, she became a role model for astrophysicist Joan Feynman. Feynman's mother and grandmother had dissuaded her from pursuing science, since they believed women were not physically capable of understanding scientific concepts. Feynman was inspired by Payne-Gaposchkin when she came across her work in an astronomy textbook. Seeing Payne-Gaposchkin's published research convinced Feynman that she could, in fact, follow her scientific passions.

While accepting the Henry Norris Russell Prize from the American Astronomical Society, Payne spoke of her lifelong passion for research: "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 understand something. Nothing can compare with that experience [...] The reward of the old scientist is the sense of having seen a vague sketch grow into a masterly landscape."

Personal life

In her autobiography, Payne said that while in school she created an experiment on the efficacy of prayer by dividing her exams in two groups, praying for success only on one, the other one being a scientific control group. She achieved the higher marks in the latter group. Later on, she became an agnostic.

In 1931, Payne became a United States citizen, so she held joint citizenship of both the UK and the US. On a tour through Europe in 1933, she met Russian-born astrophysicist (1898-1984) in Germany. She helped him get a visa to the United States. They married in March 1934, settling in Lexington, Massachusetts, a short commute from Harvard. Payne added her husband's name to her own and the Payne-Gaposchkins had three children: Edward, Katherine, and Peter. Payne's daughter remembers her as "an inspired seamstress, an inventive knitter, and a voracious reader". Payne and her family were members of the First Unitarian Church in Lexington, where Cecilia taught Sunday school. She was also active with the Quakers.

During the World War II years, work at the observatory was virtually stopped, but Payne and her husband continued, often taking their children with them to work. They lived in Lexington, while on a small farm they had near Townsend, a neighbour helped them raise pigs and poultry and to deliver meat and eggs to local markets.

She died at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on December 7, 1979, aged 79. Shortly before her death, Payne had her autobiography privately printed as The Dyer's Hand. It was reprinted later as, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections. Payne's granddaughter, Cecilia Gaposchkin, is a professor of late medieval cultural history and French history at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.

Payne-Gaposchkin's children also became scientists like their parents. Katherine Haramundanis and Peter John Arthur Gaposchkin became astronomers. Edward Michael Gaposchkin became a computer scientist and a geologist.

thumb|Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin photographed by [[Lynn Gilbert]]

Honors and awards

Elected member of Royal Astronomical Society while still a student at Cambridge (1923)
Listed among 250 scientists added to the fourth edition of American Men of Science (1927)
First recipient of the Annie J. Cannon Award in Astronomy (1934)
Member of the American Philosophical Society (1936)
Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1943)
Received the Award of Merit from Radcliffe College (1952)
Awarded the Rittenhouse Medal from the Rittenhouse Astronomical Society at the Franklin Institute (1961)
Named Professor Emerita of Harvard University (1967)
Namesake of Asteroid 2039 Payne-Gaposchkin, discovered in 1974
Henry Norris Russell Lectureship of the American Astronomical Society (1976)
Institute of Physics Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Medal and Prize named in her honor (2008)
The American Physical Society's Doctoral Dissertation Award in Astrophysics was renamed the Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Doctoral Dissertation Award in Astrophysics (2018)
Namesake of one of the ASAS-SN telescopes deployed in South Africa
Honorary Degrees from Rutgers University, Wilson College, Smith College, Western College, Colby College, and the Women's Medical College of Pennsylvania
Namesake of the Payne-Gaposchkin Patera (volcano) on Venus
In 2026, English Heritage installed a blue plaque in her honour on 70 Lansdowne Road, London, where she lived in her teens.

Selected bibliography

Published academic books:

Significant research papers:

References

External links

Oral history interview transcript with Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin on 5 March 1968, American Institute of Physics, Niels Bohr Library & Archives – interview conducted by Owen Gingerich at Harvard College Observatory
Biography from Goodsell Observatory
Bibliography from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific
Chercheuses d'étoiles, an episode about Cecilia Payne as part of Le Monde's series on women in science (in French)