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Biography of Cecilia Payne-GaposchkinName: Cecilia Payne-GaposchkinBirth Date: May 10, 1900 Death Date: December 7, 1979 Place of Birth: Wendover, England Nationality: American Gender: Female Occupations: astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979) was a pioneer in the field of astronomy and one of the most eminent female astronomers of the twentieth century. She was the first to apply the laws of atomic physics to the study of the temperature and density of stellar bodies and to conclude that hydrogen and helium, the two lightest elements, were also the two most common elements in the universe.Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin's revelation that hydrogen, the simplest of the known elements, was the most abundant substance in the universe has since become the basis for analysis of the cosmos. Yet she is not officially credited with the discovery, made when she was a 25-year-old doctoral candidate at Harvard, because her conservative male superiors convinced her to retract her findings on stellar hydrogen and publish a far less definitive statement. While she is perhaps best known for her later work in identifying and measuring variable stars …showed first 150 words…
…showed last 150 words…Arts and Sciences founded1933: End of Prohibition in the United States1948: Apartheid began South Africa1956: U.S. Supreme Court declared segregation of buses unconstitutional1961: Berlin Wall was erected1978: Louise Brown, the first "test tube baby," was born Further Reading booksAbir-Am, P. and D. Outram, editors, Uneasy Careers and Intimate Lives: Women in Science 1789-1979, Rutgers University Press, 1987.Kass-Simon, G. and Patricia Farnes, editors, Women of Science: Righting the Record, Indiana University Press, 1990.periodicalsBartusiak, Marcia, "The Stuff of Stars," in The Sciences, September/October, 1993, pp. 34-39.Dobson, Andrea K. and Katherine Bracher, "A Historical Introduction to Women in Astronomy," in Mercury, January/February 1992, pp. 4-15.Lankford, John, "Explicating an Autobiography," in Isis, March 1985, pp. 80-83.Lankford, John and Ricky L. Slavings, "Gender and Science: Women in American Astronomy, 1859-1940," in Physics Today, March 1990, pp. 58-65.Smith, E., "Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin," in Physics Today, June 1980, pp. 64-66.Whitney, C., "Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Astronomer's Astronomer," in Sky and Telescope, March 1980, page 212-214. |