Cecilia helena payne gaposchkin biography definition

April 23, The Royal Astronomical Society. American Astronomical Society. American Physical Society. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society. November MacTutor: Biographies. University of St. Retrieved September 5, Arias, P. La scultura arcaica in marmo dell'Acropoli. La storiografia della scultura greca del VI sec. L'Erma Di Bretschneider.

ISBN Payne, Humfrey Gilbert Garth Wendover News. February 1, ISSN In Haramundanis, Katherine ed. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: an autobiography and other recollections 2 ed. Cambridge University Press. Women at Cambridge. September 1, Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics. S2CID Radcliffe College. Bibcode : PhDT OCLC We Need to Talk About Kelvin.

London: Faber and Faber. Bibcode : Sci JSTOR PMID Astrophysical Journal. Bibcode : ApJ March 7, Archived from the original on March 7, January Retrieved September 8, American Women of Science Since Penguin Publishing Group. American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Retrieved July 29, Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers. Harvard UniversityDepartment of Astronomy.

Retrieved August 7, American Institute of Physics. February 6, Retrieved March 3, May 10, I believe that she is the type of person who, given the opportunity, would devote her whole life to astronomy and she would not want to run away after a few years' training to get married. She managed to gather sufficient financial support and, later in became a National Research Fellow at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, becoming affiliated to the Harvard College Observatory.

In the interview [ 8 ] she explained how she came to undertake the work which led to her famous thesis, work which was not what Shapley suggested she undertook:- [ Shapley ] was very encouraging, very kind and helpful, and he was always interested in what everyone was doing and thinking. But I remember his saying to me after some months [ of applying the ionization equation to spectra ]"Why don't you get some little thing together and publish it?

The person who told me this remarked that this of course was aimed at R H Fowlerbecause they wanted to get R H Fowler to write up his stuff. And I said to myself, "I will write a paper on the observational study of matter at high temperatures," which words you will find on the title page of "Stellar Atmospheres" and that is the reason why it was there.

I didn't expect to get the Adams Prize; I very much doubt whether a woman would be eligible. But I said to myself, "At least I am going to make a contribution to the subject as good and as valuable as the theoretical paper somebody is going to write and get the prize with," So I was pretty ambitious, it seems funny now. Her results led her to the conclusion that hydrogen and helium were by far the most common elements in stars, a view which contradicted that of the time which believed that stars would have a similar composition to the Earth.

A draft of her paper containing these results, in particular showing that hydrogen was a million times more abundant that the metals in stars, was sent to the leading astronomer Henry Norris Russell who replied that this was "clearly impossible. Probably the result may be considered, for hydrogen, as another aspect of its abnormal behaviour She received a Ph.

After two years at Harvard Observatory on a fellowship she knew she wanted to stay there and was appointed as a research fellow. She held this position from to when she was appointed as Technical Assistant to Harlow Shapley.

Cecilia helena payne gaposchkin biography definition

This was poorly paid and was in no way appropriate for her expertise and achievements but at least she was able to have a home of her own. For several of her achievements she received no credit having been persuaded not to publish. For example in she detected the Stark effect in the spectra of the hottest stars but both Russell and Shapley were sceptical and she did not publish.

She was also persuaded not to publish on interstellar absorption. Both were established a few years later by others. Jeremy Knowles, dean of the Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences in February when Payne-Gaposchkin's achievements were being celebrated, said see [ 39 ] :- Payne-Gaposchkin's most dramatic scientific contribution was the discovery that hydrogen is millions of times more abundant than any other element in the universe.

Every high school student knows that Newton discovered gravity, that Darwin discovered evolution, even that Einstein discovered relativity. But when it comes to the composition of our universe, the textbooks simply say that the most prevalent element in the universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know. She directed graduate research without status; she had no research leave; and her small salary was categorized by the department under 'equipment.

She published The stars of high luminosity in We became close friends, sharing our common interests in astronomy and music including compositionand many evenings were spent together, either in concert halls or at her home which she shared with Miss Frances Wright and where I played the piano - Beethoven, Musorgsky, and also my own creations.

In Payne-Gaposchkin became a US citizen, however tragic events in - 33 changed her life. In summer Adelaide Ames, one of her close friends and a colleague at the Observatory, drowned in a canoeing accident. Then on two days in May she learnt of the death of two close friends, Bill Waterford who had shared musical interests with her, was killed in a motorcycle accident in South Africa, and her closest friend at Newnham College, Betty Leaf, tragically died.

She wrote [ 1 ] :- Adelaide and Betty - all that I was not, beautiful, delicate, beloved were dead and I was alive. My resolution to open my heart to the world had what I suppose was the inevitable result. She planned a trip to cecilia helena payne gaposchkin biography definition the observatories of Northern Europe. Following her marriage to Gaposchkin, a Russian emigre astronomer, the couple pioneered research into variable stars stars whose luminosity fluctuatesincluding research on the structure of the Milky Way and the nearby galaxies known as the Magellanic Clouds.

Through their studies they made over two million magnitude estimates of the variable stars in the Magellanic Clouds. From the s until Payne-Gaposchkin's death on December 7,she published over papers and several monographs, including "The Stars of High Luminosity"a virtual encyclopedia of astrophysics, and Variable Starsa standard reference book of astronomy written with her husband.

She also published four books in the s on the subject of stars and stellar evolution. Moreover, though she retired from her academic post at Harvard inbecoming Emeritus Professor of Harvard University the following year, she continued to write and conduct research until her death. Her autobiography, writings collected after her death by her daughter, Katherine Haramundanis, was entitled Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections and was published in Payne-Gaposchkin was elected to the Royal Astronomical Society while she was a student at Cambridge inand the following year she was granted membership in the American Astronomical Society.

She became a citizen of the United States in She and her husband had three children: Edward, born inKatherine, born inand Peter, born in —a noted cecilia helena payne gaposchkin biography definition analyst and physicist in his own right. In Payne-Gaposchkin received the Annie J. Cannon Prize for significant contributions to astronomy from the American Astronomical Society.

In she was elected to membership in the American Philosophical Society. In she became the youngest astronomer ever starred in American Men of Scienceand two years later she became a member of the International Astronomical Union and was appointed to the Commission on Spectral Classification. Payne subsequently researched the intrinsically brightest stars, and first described many of their peculiarities and identified numerous exotic ions in their spectra.

Her second Harvard College Observatory monograph, The Stars of High Luminosityappeared infollowed by additional papers on these rare and unusual stars. Her studies provided the foundation for later work in which she used these brilliant beacons to probe the distant structure of our Milky Way system. Between andshe was author or coauthor of seventy-eight papers dealing with the analysis of stellar spectra.

As a consequence of these appointments, Payne was shunted aside from her beloved spectra and astrophysics, and to maintain a research position, she was obliged to work on stellar photometry, which she did with more competence than enthusiasm. In Payne toured the observatories of northern Europe, going as far as Leningrad. Gaposchkin, who was trying to escape Nazi persecution.

Back in the United Statesshe went to Washington, D. Theirs was a tempestuous but enduring relationship; the couple became the parents of a daughter and two sons, all of whom have scientific careers. From through Payne-Gaposchkin was author or coauthor of fifty-eight papers dealing with photometry. However, building on her researches on stellar photometry, the Gaposchkins began an ambitious systematic investigation of all known variable stars brighter than the tenth magnitude.

Her astonishing encyclopedic memory made these stars her personal friends and provided a constant source of amazement to her colleagues. Subsequently, during the late s and s, with the help over time of twenty-nine assistants, they made more than 1, measurements of variable stars on the Harvard photographic plates. In they were invited to a select international conference in Paris on novae and white dwarf stars, indicative of their stature in the variable star field.

The meeting took place on the very brink of World War II. When the United States entered the war, the Gaposchkins purchased and equipped a poultry farm in central Massachusetts, from which they sent thousands of eggs and hundreds of turkeys to the market, but their intentions to provide employment for a refugee family went unfulfilled.

They also organized a Forum for International Problems, which met at the observatory and which attempted to represent each side of the issues, but which earned for Payne-Gaposchkin the reputation of being a dangerous radical. Her boldly titled popular book ofStars in the Makingcame when most astronomers assumed that the age of the Sun was essentially the age of the universe, and when they were only just starting to appreciate the vast quantities of hydrogen in interstellar space.

Her monographs Variable Stars and Galactic Structure and The Galactic Novaeand her final book Stars and Clusterspublished shortly before her death, helped link more closely the connection of star births with the structure of the Milky Way. Much as Payne-Gaposchkin might have wished to obtain her own observations, particularly high-dispersion spectra of stars, to fuel her astrophysical interests, she was in a singularly poor position to procure these.

Harvard Observatory at that time did not have adequate spectrographic facilities for herself or her students. The large telescopes in the American West were entirely male dominated during those years, and at best she could beg spectra of secondary interest from her western colleagues. But she continued to make use of the plates acquired by Harvard, particularly from the southern stations.

In the s the Gaposchkins undertook a systematic reanalysis of the variable stars in the Magellanic Cloudsbased on the photographic plates in the Harvard collection. Sergei Gaposchkin and eighteen assistants made more than a million visual estimates of magnitudes for variable stars in the Magellanic Clouds and Payne-Gaposchkin derived the periods for 3, of them.

She outlined the broad history of the relatively recent burst of star formation in this nearby galaxy, which about million years ago swept from the southeast to the northwest ends of the bar, with a duration of about 20 million years. Though she lectured at the observatory and advised doctoral dissertations, her classes were not listed in the course catalog until In she became the first woman professor to have received tenure at Harvard, although she was not the first tenured woman professor at Harvard.

The basis of this curious distinction is that she was tenured by the Harvard Corporation in as Phillips Astronomer, but she did not become a professor untilby which time three other women had become professors in the arts and sciences.