The Researcher.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, the forgotten star of astrophysics.
Information.
- Birth Name: Cecilia Helena Payne Gaposchkin
- Born: 1900
- Died: 1979
- Nationality: British
In 1925, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin revolutionized our understanding of the universe: in her doctoral thesis at Harvard, she demonstrated that stars are primarily composed of hydrogen and helium.
Her work marked a major turning point in modern astrophysics, paving the way for a new understanding of the composition and formation of stars.
Cecilia Payne discovered the composition of stars using spectroscopy, by analyzing their light and spectral lines observed with the instruments at the Harvard Observatory.
The Matilda Effect.
Although Cecilia Payne formulated the discovery first, her work was initially rejected or attributed to her mentor, astronomer Henry Norris Russell, who gained public recognition before her.
This episode perfectly illustrates the Matilda Effect, a term describing the tendency to minimize or attribute to male scientists the discoveries made by women. Decades later, Russell publicly acknowledged that she had been right all along.