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    Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin

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    Lane Lopes
    Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin (1900-1979) was a pioneering female astronomer who established that stars are primarily made of hydrogen and helium. She was inspired to study astronomy after Arthur Eddington's 1919 confirmation of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Payne earned her PhD from Harvard in 1925 with a thesis considered the "most brilliant" in astronomy. She later became the first woman to receive a full professorship from Harvard. Her portrait now hangs in Harvard Yard alongside only two other female faculty members.

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    Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin

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    Lane Lopes
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    Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin (1900-1979) was a pioneering female astronomer who established that stars are primarily made of hydrogen and helium. She was inspired to study astronomy after Arthur Eddington's 1919 confirmation of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Payne earned her PhD from Harvard in 1925 with a thesis considered the "most brilliant" in astronomy. She later became the first woman to receive a full professorship from Harvard. Her portrait now hangs in Harvard Yard alongside only two other female faculty members.

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    Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin (1900-1979) was a pioneering female astronomer who established that stars are primarily made of hydrogen and helium. She was inspired to study astronomy after Arthur Eddington's 1919 confirmation of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Payne earned her PhD from Harvard in 1925 with a thesis considered the "most brilliant" in astronomy. She later became the first woman to receive a full professorship from Harvard. Her portrait now hangs in Harvard Yard alongside only two other female faculty members.

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    72 views2 pages

    Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin

    Uploaded by

    Lane Lopes
    Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin (1900-1979) was a pioneering female astronomer who established that stars are primarily made of hydrogen and helium. She was inspired to study astronomy after Arthur Eddington's 1919 confirmation of Einstein's theory of general relativity. Payne earned her PhD from Harvard in 1925 with a thesis considered the "most brilliant" in astronomy. She later became the first woman to receive a full professorship from Harvard. Her portrait now hangs in Harvard Yard alongside only two other female faculty members.

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    Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin (1900-1979)

    During the total solar eclipse on 29 May 1919, Arthur Eddington carried out
    measurements of the bending of light from distant stars by the mass of our own star,
    the sun. Albert Einstein had reported his prediction based on the general theory of
    relativity of the bending angle (1.75 arc seconds, about twice as much as the classical
    value derived from Newton's theory) at a meeting of the Prussian Academy in Berlin
    in November 1915. Eddington’s measurements agreed with Einstein’s prediction —
    and were widely publicized as corroboration of Einstein’s new theory of gravity.
    Einstein was catapulted to world fame as a result.

    Eddington’s astronomy course at the University of Cambridge enthused a female


    student of the name Cecilia Payne, who was 19 when Eddington confirmed
    Einstein’s theory. In 1923, upon earning a B.A. from Cambridge, Cecilia, with
    Eddington’s blessing, crossed the Atlantic to continue her studies of astronomy
    under Harlow Shapley at the Harvard College Observatory. Cecilia was led to
    believe that women had more opportunities for astronomical research in the U.S.
    than in England. In 1925, she defended her PhD thesis, which was characterized by
    a leading astronomer of her day, Otto Struve, as the “most brilliant thesis ever written
    in astronomy.” Indeed, in her thesis, Cecilia established that, despite appearances,
    all stars are made essentially of the same stuff, namely hydrogen and helium (the
    differences in appearance are due to different surface temperatures of the stars). In
    1934 she married a fellow astronomer, Sergei Gaposchkin, and has been known
    since as Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (or Mrs. G to her colleagues and students). In
    1938 she was named lecturer with tenure at the Harvard Observatory and in 1956
    professor of astronomy, the first woman promoted to a full professorship from within
    Harvard. Cecilia’s portrait, please see below, now embellishes the Faculty Room at
    University Hall, the backdrop of the statue of John Harvard in Harvard Yard. There
    are only two other woman faculty included in this gallery. Currently, 40% of non-
    tenured and 27% tenured faculty at Harvard are women.

    Portrait of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (2001) by Patricia Watwood who supposedly


    took inspiration from Vermeer’s The Astronomer (perhaps in the choice of colors
    and the mood …). Commissioned by Georgene & Dudley Herschbach.

    Bretislav Friedrich https://www.fhi.mpg.de/209437/Friedrich

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