Post #2790882
2023-05-10 15:22 UTC
Before Payne's work, the accepted theory significantly underestimated the abundance of Hydrogen and Helium in stars. Existing models assumed the composition of the sun was similar to that of Earth.
Estimates of the amount of H were made using Balmer absorption. But this involves H atoms in the first excited state. Payne realized that for the 5800K surface temp of the sun, only 1 per 10⁸ H atoms are in this state.
She concluded that stars are mostly H and He!
Replies (1)
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@mcnees@mastodon.social 2023-05-10 15:23
[Enter villain] Henry Norris Russell, a prominent astronomer, was *sure* Payne was wrong. He convinced her to omit the result from her thesis. A few years later he realized that HE was wrong, and published the result himself. https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1929ApJ....70...11R/abstract