Post #2790880
2023-05-10 15:18 UTC
Cambridge wasn’t awarding degrees to women yet, so in 1923 Cecilia moved to the US. Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard College Observatory, offered her a graduate fellowship.
Shapley believed that the Milky Way was the whole universe. In 1924 he received a letter from Edwin Hubble showing that the Andromeda nebula was a separate galaxy. Payne was in Shapley’s office at the time, and he said to her "Here is the letter that has destroyed my universe."
More here: https://mastodon.social/@mcnees/109614690601381175
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@mcnees@mastodon.social 2023-05-10 15:20
In her thesis, Payne applied developments in quantum mechanics to understand the observatory's immense catalog of stellar spectra. She estimated elemental abundances in stars and showed that spectra were influenced by the amount of ionization at different temperatures. Payne's thesis "Stellar Atmospheres" was published in 1925. The astronomers Otto Struve and Velta Zeberg supposedly said it was "undoubtedly the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy." https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1925PhDT.........1P/abstract