Cecilia payne gaposchkin biography template

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The trail she blazed into the largely male-dominated scientific community has been an inspiration to many.

Quotation
The reward of the young scientist is the emotional thrill of being the first person in the history of the world to see something or to understand something. She then studied variable stars, making over 1,250,000 observations with her assistants.

Seeing Payne-Gaposchkin's research published in this way convinced Feynman that she could, in fact, follow her scientific passions.

Source: Wikipedia

She published her conclusions in her second book, Stars of High Luminosity (1930). In 1919, she won a scholarship to Newnham College, Cambridge University, where she read botany, physics, and chemistry.

in astronomy from Radcliffe College (now part of Harvard). After being introduced to Harlow Shapley, the Director of the Harvard College Observatory, who had just begun a graduate program in astronomy, she left England in 1923. She, unfortunately, found herself in that position. She showed that the great variation in stellar absorption lines was due to differing amounts of ionization at different temperatures, not to different amounts of elements.

in 1925.
—Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Cecilia Payne Gaposchkin Resources 

This March Women's History Month astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin biography is perfect for 6th-8th grade reading, science literacy, women in STEM biography studies, & research projects! This engaging two-page Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin biography explores her groundbreaking discovery about the composition of stars, her challenges as a woman in astrophysics, and her lasting impact on modern astronomy.

Advancements in telescopes allowed scientists to see the sky in a new way, but many scientists kept with the same thinking.

In 1924, Payne-Gaposchkin was a doctoral student in physics at Harvard University. However, with Payne-Gaposchkin's Ph.D., women entered the 'mainstream'.

The trail she blazed into the largely male-dominated scientific community was an inspiration to many.

cecilia payne gaposchkin biography template

This work later was extended to the Magellanic Clouds, adding a further 2,000,000 observations of variable stars. The lecture changed her life and inspired her to become an astronomer. However, she found that helium and particularly hydrogen were vastly more abundant (for hydrogen, by a factor of about one million). She consequently described the result in her thesis as "spurious".

Three years before her death in 1979, she received a lifetime achievement award from the American Astronomical Society. However, Russell changed his mind four years later after having derived the same result by different means and publishing it. He got the credit,” Moore says.

History would later correct itself, and Payne-Gaposchkin would become known as the scientist who truly identified what the stars were made of.

Not until 1938 was she given the title of "astronomer." In 1956 she became the first female tenured professor at Harvard, and later its first female department chair.

According to G. Kass-Simon and Patricia Farnes, her career marked a sort of turning point at Harvard College Observatory.