Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
British-born American astronomer
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She figured out what stars are made of — hydrogen and helium, mostly — and the men running astrophysics told her she was wrong. It took years for independent observations to prove she'd been right all along.
About
Cecilia Payne was born in Britain in 1900 and studied at Cambridge, where she completed her work but couldn't receive a degree because she was a woman. She moved to America and pursued astronomy at Harvard, which also wouldn't grant her a PhD, so Radcliffe College awarded her doctoral degree in 1925 for a thesis that upended cosmology: stars were made primarily of hydrogen and helium, not the same mix of elements as Earth. Henry Norris Russell and others rejected the conclusion outright until independent data forced them to admit she'd been correct. She kept working, publishing major texts on…
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- WikidataHigh confidencewikidata · wikidata.org
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- Pantheon 2.0High confidencedatabase · pantheon.world
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