Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
Cecilia Helena Payne- Gaposchkin ( born May 10, 1900 as Cecilia Payne in Wendover, Buckinghamshire, England; † December 7, 1979 in Cambridge (Massachusetts ), USA ) was an English-American astronomer.
She studied from 1919 natural sciences, particularly astronomy at Cambridge University, which at that time but no women awarded academic title. From 1923 she worked as part of a program to promote women of the Observatory of Harvard University, the first doctoral student of Harlow Shapley. In 1925, she received her doctorate at Radcliffe College, because Harvard was too conservative. In her dissertation, she showed that the variability of the stellar spectra do not, as it was then generally believed to reflect a correspondingly different composition, but is mainly caused by the thermal ionization. The composition of the star is rather quite uniform and similar for most elements of the earth. Your findings, hydrogen and helium are the main ingredients, it had, however, under pressure from Henry Norris Russell, Shapley's teacher, revoke: "almost Certainly not real." After independent measurements confirmed Russell 1929 but this result. Her doctoral thesis was called in retrospect as " undoubtedly most brilliant doctoral thesis " from the Department of Astronomy.
In 1956 she became a professor at Harvard University.
Publications
- Stellar Atmospheres, A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars, PhD thesis, Radcliffe College, 1925, 215 pages.
- Introduction to Astronomy, Prentice- Hall, 1954, 508 pages.
- The 1960 minimum of R Coronae Borealis, ApJ Vol 138, 1963, pp. 320-341.
- The galactic novae, Dover Publication, 1964.