Cecilia Payne

Cecilia Payne (10 May 1900 – 7 December 1979)

Since her death in 1979, Cecilia Payne, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of, has hardly been heard of. Every high school student knows that Isaac Newton discovered gravity, that Charles Darwin discovered evolution, and that Albert Einstein discovered the relativity of time. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.

Cecilia Payne’s family refused to spend money on further education, so she won a scholarship to Cambridge. She completed her studies, but Cambridge wouldn’t give her a degree because of the status of women at that time, so she moved to the United States to work at Harvard. She was elected as a member of the Royal Astronomical Society while still at Cambridge in 1923 and in 1927 she became one of the 250 scientists added to the 4th edition of “American Men of Science”!

Cecilia Payne was the first person ever to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College, and not only did Cecilia Payne discover what the universe is made of, 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 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, after many years in low paid research jobs, 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.