Cecilia Helena Payne was born May 10, 1900, in Wendover, England. Her education began at St. Paul’s Girls’ School. At the age of 19, she was awarded a scholarship to Newnham College within Cambridge University, where she studied botany, physics, and chemistry. Payne completed her studies at Cambridge, but did not receive a degree because of her sex; Cambridge only awarded degrees to women after 1948. Her interest in astronomy was sparked when she attended a lecture by Arthur Eddington on his 1919 expedition to a remote island of the coast of west Africa to observe and photograph the stars during a solar eclipse.
As a woman in the United Kingdom, Payne’s only career option was to become a school teacher. Knowing this, she left England in 1923 to pursue a degree in the United States. After meeting Harlow Shapeley, the Director of the Harvard College Observatory, Payne began her studies at Radcliffe College (now Harvard College Observatory) on a fellowship encouraging women to study at the Observatory.
In 1925, Payne became the first person to receive a Ph. D in astronomy at Radcliffe College. Her doctoral research was in the composition of the various layers of stars, analyzing the spectral classes to their temperatures by applying Indian physicist Meghnad Saha’s ionization theory. In Payne’s research, she showed that common metals in the Sun’s spectrum displayed similar relative abundances to those found in Earth’s spectrum, agreeing with the belief at the time that the Sun had a similar composition to the Earth. However, in the course of her research, Payne discovered that hydrogen and helium were vastly more abundant than the other metallic elements, hydrogen by a factor of approximately one million. Her thesis concluded that hydrogen was the primary constituent of stars, and thus, it was the most abundant element in the universe.
The review panel for Payne’s dissertation included astronomer Henry Norris Russell, who vehemently defended the accepted belief that the Sun and the Earth were of similar compositions. Russell dismissed Payne’s research as incorrect, as it was considered too controversial, and dissuaded her from presenting the conclusion that the Sun was predominantly composed of hydrogen. However, four years later, he came to the same result by different means and published it. While Russell briefly acknowledged Cecilia Payne’s work in his paper, he was still often given credit for her discovery.
Cecilia Payne is just one of the many Harvard Computers, a team of women researchers analyzing the stars and working to develop a classification system based on the data made available by the latest technology, spectroscopy. This team was started by the Director of the Harvard College Observatory, Edward Charles Pickering, (Director form 1877-1919) who chose to hire women as skilled workers to process astronomical data. While often referred to as “Pickering’s Harem,” the Harvard Computers were some of the most brilliant minds in early 20th century astronomy, sadly ignored by the world because they were women.
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