Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1936 and called by some “the most prominent woman astronomer of all time.” She was one of three children born in Wendover in Buckinghamshire, England to Emma and Edward John Payne, a London barrister. Edward Payne was also a gifted musician who also wrote music. He died when Cecilia was only four; their mother was left to raise the young family on her own. Emma Payne (née Pertz) came from a distinguished Prussian family, which included scholars in both history and literature. She fostered young Cecilia’s tastes for literature, music, painting, and gardens. When Cecilia was 12 years old, her mother moved the family to London for the education of her brother Humfry, who would later become an archaeologist. Cecilia began her schooling by attending St. Mary’s College in Paddington, which did not offer much of a curriculum in math or science. However, in 1918 she transferred to St. Paul’s Girls’ School, which she described as “a step from medieval to modern times.”
She was able to continue her education at Newnham College, Cambridge, when she won an open scholarship large enough to pay her expenses. She began her studies by reading botany, physics, and chemistry, but after a disappointing year in botanical research, she turned to the physical sciences. As Cecilia began to expand her study of physics, she attended a lecture which changed the trajectory of her life and career. She heard Arthur Eddington (APS 1931) recount his experiences observing and photographing the stars off the West Coast of Africa near a solar eclipse as a test of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. She later wrote in her autobiography, The Dyer’s Hand: “The result was a complete transformation of my world picture. I knew again the thunderclap that had come from the realization that all motion is relative … My world had been so shaken that I experienced something very like a nervous breakdown.” She could not transfer to astronomy at Cambridge, which treated astronomy as a branch of mathematics, but she could attend the lectures in astronomy in addition to her physics coursework. She completed her studies at Cambridge but received no degree because she was a woman; Cambridge would not grant degrees to women until 1948.
Payne knew she was at another turning point in her life. Her impressive knowledge and education still left her with only one option: teaching. Again, fate intervened. A friend offered to take her to London to hear a lecture by Harlow Shapley (APS 1922), the newly appointed Director of the Harvard College Observatory. Payne seized the opportunity and told Shapley she would like to work with him at the Observatory and he replied he would be “delighted.” When she arrived at Harvard, she made many lifelong friends, including Annie Jump Cannon (APS 1925), the Curator of the Observatory’s Astronomical Photographs. She also communicated to Shapley that although she was interested in the photographic study of variable stars, she was far more interested in the physical interpretation of stellar spectra. Her enthusiasm impressed Shapley, and he encouraged Payne to go beyond the master’s stage and write a doctoral dissertation. In 1925, she became the first person to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Harvard University’s Radcliffe College with her thesis: Stellar Atmospheres; A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars. Astronomer Otto Struve (APS 1937) called her work “undoubtedly the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.” And yet, she never received credit for one of the paper’s most striking conclusions: that hydrogen was the most overwhelming constituent of stars, and so the most abundant element in the universe. Her male superiors persuaded her to retract her findings and publish a less definitive statement. Thirteen years later, when Henry Norris Russell (APS 1913) reached the same conclusion, he briefly credited Payne’s earlier work and discovery, but he still is credited by many for the conclusions she reached. Years later, Struve told Payne he would mention her prior discovery in a history of astrophysics he was writing; she refused. “I was to blame for not having pressed my point … If you are sure of your facts, you should defend your position.”
Payne reached another turning point in her life in 1933. She lost two dear friends, one from her childhood, within two days. She began to lose herself in grief, and friends advised her to travel. She planned a trip to visit the observatories of northern Europe. Her destinations included Finland, the U.S.S.R. and Nazi Germany. She traveled alone in the U.S.S.R. under the warning that no government could protect her. Her stay there was unnerving, and caused her to wonder at her departure if the train ever would reach Berlin. She was so shaken that she almost skipped the meeting of the Astronomische Gesellschaft in Göttingen, but she chose to attend and met a young Russian emigre, Sergei Gaposchkin. He had overcome many hardships to reach Germany, where he now worked under menacing conditions, and Cecilia was determined to help him escape Nazi persecution. She wrote: “Only when I was back in the United States did I feel I could breathe freely. And here it was possible to act freely too. I had never tried to exert any influence before, but I tried it now. A place was found at Harvard; I went to Washington to expedite the granting of a visa to a stateless man.” Cecilia married Sergei in 1934 and became Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin.
She and Sergei became a scientific team; he wrote his thesis on eclipsing variable stars; together the Gaposchkins hoped to arrange all species of variable stars into a coherent pattern by studying the variations in their brightness. Their resource was the Harvard Observatory’s photographic plate collection. Since several hundred plates existed for each star, Sergei organized a systematic plan for the examination of the plates. The Gaposchkins’ “Variable Stars” appeared in 1938 and by 1950 the continuing project involved nearly two million brightness estimates. From 1950 to 1975 they added another two million observations and many resulting publications.
Their personal lives centered on their three children: Katherine and Peter would become astronomers; Edward a neurosurgeon. Her daughter remembered her as “... a Renaissance woman … Erudite in several languages, a world traveler, a book lover, she was also an inspired cook, a marvelous seamstress, an inventive knitter and a voracious reader.”
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin never left Harvard, but for the greater part of her academic career she received low pay and held no official position until 1938 when she was named Astronomer. When Donald Menzel (APS 1943) became Director of the Harvard Observatory in 1954, he supported her promotion to full professor from within the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences. She became the Phillips Professor of Astronomy in 1958, and when she became Chair of the Department of Astronomy, she became the first woman to head a department at Harvard. Payne-Gaposchkin continued her scientific writing through 1978. She received too many honors to name, among them the Rittenhouse Medal in 1961 and six honorary Doctor of Science degrees, including one from Cambridge University. Jesse L. Greenstein (APS 1968) concluded his Biographical Memoir of Payne-Gaposchkin in the APS Year Book with one of her favorite quotations from a Wordsworth poem. “In these lines she expressed the complex meanings that informed her personal life and work. ‘Knowing that Nature never did betray the heart that loved her …’ ”
Sources:
Greene, Jesse L., “Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979).” American Philosophical Society Year Book, 1980: 573-579.
Payne-Gaposchkin, Cecilia. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: An Autobiography and Other Recollections, by Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. Edited by Katherine Haramundanis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.
Sobel, Dava. The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars. New York: Viking, 2016.