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You’ve probably never heard of Cecilia Payne, so I thought I’d share her story.

Born in 1900, Payne attended Cambridge where she initially studied botany in her first year, but decided to pursue astronomy after listening to a lecture on photographing stars near a solar eclipse to test Einstein’s theory of gravity. She finished her studies but did not receive a degree because Cambridge did not grant degrees to women at the time (they only started granting women degrees in 1948).

Frustrated with her career prospects in the UK, Payne enrolled at Harvard and became the first person to receive a PhD in astronomy from Harvard in 1925. Her thesis, entitled, “Stellar Atmospheres; A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars,” originally proposed the idea that the sun was composed mostly of hydrogen and helium. However, after her thesis was reviewed by astronomer Henry Norris Russell, Payne was forced to conclude that her results were not actually valid because it contradicted the widely accepted belief at the time that the Sun and Earth were both composed of very similar elemental compositions.

In 1929, Russell realized that Payne’s original conclusions were correct. He published his own paper and received credit for Payne’s conclusions. Astronomer Otto Struve described Payne’s thesis as “the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy.”

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