Cecilia Payne-Gaposhkin

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Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin at work in the Harvard College Observatory
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Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin (* May 10, 1900 as Cecilia Payne in Wendover , Buckinghamshire , England , † December 7, 1979 in Cambridge (Massachusetts) , USA ) was a British-American astronomer .

life and work

Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin.

From 1919 she studied natural sciences , especially astronomy , at Cambridge University , which at that time did not award women any academic degrees . From 1923 she worked as part of a program to promote women at the Harvard University observatory as Harlow Shapley's first doctoral student . She worked with Annie Jump Cannon , who dealt with the evaluation of star spectra.

In 1925 she received her doctorate from Radcliffe College , because Harvard was too conservative for that. In her dissertation, she demonstrated that the variability of the stellar spectra does not reflect a correspondingly different composition, as was generally assumed at the time, but is primarily caused by thermal ionization . The composition of the stars is rather uniform and for most elements similar to the earthly.

Harvard Classification of Spectral Lines according to Annie Jump Cannon. The numerical subgroups are missing.

However, under pressure from Henry Norris Russell , Shapley's teacher, she had to revoke her finding that hydrogen and helium were the main components : “almost certainly not real” . After independent measurements, Russell confirmed this result in 1929. In retrospect, her doctoral thesis was described as “undoubtedly the most brilliant doctoral thesis” in the field of astronomy.

In 1956, she became Harvard University's first female professor of astronomy.

Personal

This article or the following section is not adequately provided with supporting documents ( e.g. individual evidence ). Information without sufficient evidence could be removed soon. Please help Wikipedia by researching the information and including good evidence.

In 1931 Payne became an American citizen. On a trip through Europe in 1933, she met the Russian-born astrophysicist Sergei I. Gaposchkin in Germany. She helped him obtain a visa to the United States, and the two married in March 1934 and settled in Lexington, Massachusetts. Payne added her husband's name to her own, and the Payne Gaposhkins had three children: Edward, Katherine, and Peter. She died at her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts on December 7, 1979. Shortly before her death, Payne had her autobiography privately printed as The Dyer's Hand. It was later reprinted under the title "Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Memories".

Payne's younger brother Humfry Payne (1902-1936), who married the writer and film critic Dilys Powell, was the director of the British School of Archeology in Athens. Payne's granddaughter, Cecilia Gaposchkin, is Professor of Late Medieval Cultural History and French History at Dartmouth College.

Publications

membership

Since 1936 Payne-Gaposchkin was a member of the American Philosophical Society . In 1943 she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences .

Honors

literature

  • Katherine Haramundanis: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin - an autobiography and other recollections. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996, ISBN 0-521-48390-5 .
  • Dava Sobel : The glass universe. How women discovered the stars . Berlin Verlag, Munich 2017. ISBN 978-3-8270-1214-2 , pages 291 to 314.
  • Donovan Moor: What stars are made of. The life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. Harvard University Press, Cambridge 2020. ISBN 9780674237377

Web links

Commons : Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cecelia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin Cambridge Women's Heritage Project, accessed February 21, 2020
  2. ^ Ian S. Glass: Revolutionaries of the Cosmos: The Astro-Physicists , Oxford, 2006, ISBN 0-19-857099-6 , limited preview in Google Book Search.
  3. ↑ bibcode : 1925PhDT ......... 1P , p. 188.
  4. ^ Bennett, Donahue, Schneider, Voit: Astronomie - Die kosmische Perspective , Pearson Germany 5th edition 2010, edited by Harald Lesch , page 741. ISBN 978-3-8273-7360-1
  5. ^ Dava Sobel : The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars . Viking, 2016, ISBN 9780670016952 . Quoted from Sue Nelson’s book review: History: Women who read the stars . Nature 539, 2016, doi: 10.1038 / 539491a .
  6. ↑ Member History: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. American Philosophical Society, accessed November 3, 2018 .
  7. ^ Members of the American Academy. Listed by election year, 1900-1949 ( PDF ). Retrieved September 29, 2015
personal data
SURNAME Payne-Gaposchkin, Cecilia
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Payne-Gaposchkin, Cecilia Helena (full name); Payne, Cecilia (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION English-American astronomer
DATE OF BIRTH May 10, 1900
PLACE OF BIRTH Wendover , Buckinghamshire , England
DATE OF DEATH 7th December 1979
Place of death Cambridge, Massachusetts , USA