What Stars Are Made Of

“A fine biography of perhaps the greatest astronomer of the past century that no one has heard of.

Journalist Moore’s subject is Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979), the eldest of three in a middle-class British family and clearly a prodigy, fascinated by natural history and science. Her father, who encouraged her pursuits, died when she was young, leaving the family short of money and with a mother of traditional, conservative views. As the author writes, she believed that “boys were to be educated, girls refined.” Despite favoring her son, she did not discourage Cecilia, who was lucky to encounter teachers who recognized her talents. Winning a scholarship, she studied physics at Cambridge until, inspired by a talk from the renowned Arthur Eddington, she changed to astronomy. She earned no degree because Cambridge did not give women degrees until 1948. Her teachers admitted that she had no future as an astronomer in Britain, so she went to Harvard to work under the charismatic Harlow Shapley, who was known for hiring women. Assigned to analyze the massive collection of photographic plates in observatory archives, Payne-Gaposchkin determined that helium was thousands of times more abundant and hydrogen millions of times more abundant in stars than on Earth. The discovery, presented in her 1925 doctoral thesis, was greeted skeptically but soon found to be correct. One scientist called it “the most brilliant thesis ever written in astronomy.” Although Payne-Gaposchkin enjoyed an international reputation by the 1930s, Harvard’s catalog did not list her extremely popular classes until 1945. Appointed the first woman full professor in its faculty of arts and sciences in 1956, she became chair of the department of astronomy and died with many honors. Readers will gnash their teeth as Moore recounts the discrimination she endured. This annoyed Payne-Gaposchkin, but astronomy was her obsession, so she rarely made a fuss, and male astronomers, once they realized her brilliance, mostly treated her well.

An outstanding life of an impressive scientist. ”

“What Stars Are Made Of celebrates the scientist responsible for discovering the composition of stars. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin dedicated her life to the pursuit of science when very few women were given the chance. Throughout her long career, she never stopped adapting her methods and embracing new ideas, fueled by a passion to understand the universe and our place in it.”

“Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’s success was not achieved by chance. She triumphed by facing down every obstacle, by never giving up, by being, as she says, ‘doggedly persistent.’ Donovan Moore brings Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin to the front of history in a way that inspires us, educates us, and makes us want to be better. Champions adapt, and Cecilia was a champion.”

“Through vivid and eloquent prose, this book applauds the great astronomer who discovered what stars themselves are made of. Moore brings the inspirational story of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin to center stage, where it belongs”

“I devoured this book in a single weekend. Donovan Moore artfully portrays the lack of recognition for Payne-Gaposchkin’s paradigm-changing discoveries and embarks, as resolutely as Cecilia herself, to set the record straight.”

“What Stars Are Made Of provides both an accessible introduction to and an expansive context for the life and work of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, one of the most brilliant astrophysicists of the twentieth century. The sharing of stories like Payne-Gaposchkin’s will reshape the future of science so that all aspiring scientists may reach their full potential as we continue to explore the universe.”

“Journalist Moore illuminates the amazing life and work of astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-1979) in his well-researched debut biography. Born in the English town of Wendover, Cecilia was “relentlessly” curious and taught herself math at a young age. Determined to be a scientist, Cecilia studied hard and earned a place at Cambridge in 1919, home to the finest minds in physics at the time. Lectures by Niels Bohr fueled Cecilia’s fascination with atomic physics and the new field of quantum mechanics. Moore vividly describes the challenges that Cecilia and other women faced. Cecilia’s determination and intelligence brought her to the U.S., where more professional opportunities existed for women, and to a position at Harvard College Observatory. There she met other female astronomers, including Henrietta Leavitt and Annie Jump Cannon, and used Harvard’s treasure trove of astronomical photos to determine the constituent elements of stars. In addition to Cecilia’s life, Moore captures a fascinating period of change in science, when physics was in flux and astrophysics was brand-new, and in the world as a whole, as new opportunities opened up for women. This is a fascinating look at a pioneer in science.”

“Overturning scientific dogma is no easy thing—especially as a marginalized minority. But that is just what Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin did in the male-dominated field of early 20th-century astronomy, as detailed in this biography by journalist Moore. Growing up in London, Payne-Gaposchkin trained at the prestigious Cavendish Laboratory before finally landing at the Harvard College Observatory. There she analyzed spectral lines from stars for her 1925 doctoral thesis entitled “Stellar Atmospheres.” Defying preexisting theories, which held that stars’ compositions would mirror that of Earth’s crust, Payne-Gaposchkin’s studies showed hydrogen and helium to be their main ingredients. Though initially dismissed by some of her prominent male peers, her work was ultimately recognized as “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.””

“What Stars Are Made Of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin Donovan Moore Harvard Univ. Press (2020)

Male astronomers often achieve a popular fame that eluded one of the field’s most distinguished women: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin. That should be remedied by Donovan Moore’s engaging and accessible biography. It skillfully opens up Payne’s achievements and adventures by setting them in the global village of astronomy, against the turbulent social and historical backdrop of twentieth-century Europe and the United States.

In 1925, Payne was the first person to be awarded a PhD in astronomy at Radcliffe College, at the time the women’s branch of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her thesis on stellar atmospheres is her greatest contribution: she related the line patterns in the observed spectra of stars to their physical conditions. She also discovered that hydrogen is the main component of stars, followed by helium. Her discoveries and expertise were eventually recognized with prizes and honours, culminating in a life-achievement lectureship from the American Astronomical Society.
The brilliance of Payne’s thesis was acknowledged by the most prominent US astronomers of the early twentieth century: her supervisor, Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard College Observatory; and Henry Norris Russell at Princeton University in New Jersey. But both disagreed that hydrogen is the main component of stars. She based her theory on painstaking analysis of the large cache of stellar spectra in the Harvard collection. It was informed by the predictions of Indian physicist Meghnad Saha’s theory of ionization, which relates the observed spectrum of a stellar atmosphere (assuming it is a gas in thermal equilibrium) to its temperature, pressure and composition.

Her conclusion went against a view widely espoused by prominent astronomers, including Arthur Eddington: that stars are made up of essentially the same elements as Earth (silicon, carbon, iron and so on). In response to this criticism, and because she was anxious to get her results published, Payne downplayed her finding as a possible error. Russell was later credited with the discovery, having reached the same result by different means. Payne’s role stayed hidden from the wider scientific consciousness forseveral decades.

Reaching for the stars

Moore illuminates Payne’s development into a remarkable scientist. Her mother had extensive interests outside the home — a rarity in upper-class Edwardian England. Hours spent in the household’s library equipped Payne with a knowledge and appreciation of the classics, music and theatre. After the First World War, although shy, she won over mentors and sponsors to help her study physics at the University of Cambridge (which did not award degrees to women at the time). There, she was influenced by Eddington and atomic physicist Ernest Rutherford.

In 1923, Payne set sail for the United States at Shapley’s invitation, having secured funding to become a research scientist at Harvard College Observatory. Shapley promoted her talents, but also exploited her. He encouraged her research and at her request hired Sergei Gaposchkin, a Russian astronomer escaping Europe just before the Second World War, who eventually became her husband. But he paid her poorly, so that she and Gaposchkin could not afford childcare, and their three children were often seen playing at the observatory.

He also kept her low in the professional pecking order, even advising another institution against hiring her to a prominent position. She seems to have accepted this as a fact of life, but I wonder how things would have turned out had she received proper professional recognition earlier. It was only in 1954, after Shapley was replaced as director by Donald Menzel, that she received a reasonable salary. Two years later, at the age of 56, she was awarded a Harvard professorship.

Glittering society

Payne remained at the observatory until her death in 1979. The friends she amassed read like a who’s who of early-twentieth-century physics and astronomy. They included those responsible for pushing the new atom theory (Rutherford, J. J. Thomson) and astronomers who were instrumental, with her, in opening up the astrophysical approach to understanding the Universe and its components (Shapley, Russell, Menzel, Eddington). A reproduction of Payne’s portrait in oils now hangs prominently in the lobby of the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics — a belated tribute to her hard work and dedication.

I met Payne in the mid-1970s. I remember her as a stern, chain-smoking presence stalking the halls of the observatory: she scolded me for being late for a meeting (recently arrived from Italy, I regarded being precisely on time as impolite). After reading Moore’s well-researched book, I realized that she was a complex figure with whom I can empathize despite being two generations younger and from a different background. A committed scientist and mentor to a new generation, she successfully juggled career and family with a love of the arts and world travel.

Her autobiography (published privately as The Dyer’s Hand in 1979, and publicly as Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin in 1984), is worth a read for its personal view of her multifaceted life and her interaction with observatory colleagues, including the female ‘computers’ who processed astronomical data. I also recommend for its immediacy her 1968 interview for the American Institute of Physics oral-history programme, conducted by Harvard astronomer and historian Owen Gingerich (see go.nature.com/37nm0vr). It captures her essential briskness and rare ability to talk in complex and nuanced sentences.”

“ A persistent astronomer’s journey

What Stars Are Made Of

Donovan Moore

HARVARD UNIV., $29.95

It was 1924, and Cecilia Payne- Gaposchkin was on the verge of a breakthrough. Faint rainbows of starlight, recorded on photographic glass, held secrets to how the universe was put together. If only she could read the starlight’s story.

As with every other challenge in her life, Payne-Gaposchkin would not stop. She once went without sleep for 72 hours, struggling to understand what the stars were telling her.

“It was an impatience with the ordinary — with sleep, meals, even friendships and family — that had driven her as far back as she could remember,” journalist Donovan Moore writes in his book celebrating the life of Payne- Gaposchkin (who added “Gaposchkin” to her name upon marriage in 1934). After her death in 1979, other scientists would go on to remember her as “the most eminent woman astronomer of all time.” During a time when science was largely a men’s club, she had figured out the chemical makeup of the stars.

In What Stars Are Made Of, Moore takes readers on a meticulously researched tour of Payne-Gaposchkin’s remarkable life, drawn from family interviews, contemporary accounts and Payne-Gaposchkin’s own writings. It’s a riveting tale of a woman who knocked down every wall put before her to get the answers she desired about the cosmos.

Growing up in England, her love of science started before she could read. But English society in the early 1900s didn’t know what to do with such a determined girl. Days before her 17th birthday, she was told to leave school after administrators found they couldn’t meet her insatiable need to learn math and science. During physics lectures at the University of Cambridge, she, like all women, had to sit at the front, forced to parade past male students stomping in time with her steps.

And yet, she persisted, becoming a woman of firsts. In 1925, Payne- Gaposchkin became the first person to receive a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Mass. In 1956, she was the first woman to be promoted to full professor at Harvard and several months later was the first to chair a department at the university.

Her big breakthrough came not long after finding work at Harvard College Observatory in 1923. She had taken it upon herself to analyze the institution’s library of stellar spectra: starlight broken into its component colors, revealing elements in the stars based on which wavelengths of light were missing.

The trouble was, no one had yet combed through the spectra to take a census of the atoms. Doing so required using the new field of quantum physics to identify dozens of element signatures in thousands of spectra — a task to which Payne-Gaposchkin was uniquely suited. The work was grueling and tedious, demanding she harness her keen observational skills, sharp mathematical mind and rigorous physics training.

After roughly two years of nearly unbroken focus, she overturned one of the prevailing thoughts of the day: that stars were chemically similar to Earth. Instead, hydrogen appeared to be a million times as abundant as expected, and helium a thousand times so. Earth, it seemed, was not the template for the universe.

At the time, Payne-Gaposchkin’s findings were largely dismissed as spurious. It wasn’t until the American astronomer Henry Norris Russell came to the same conclusion years later that minds started to change.

While opinions about her work were slow to change, progress in opinions toward women was glacial. Payne- Gaposchkin taught at Harvard for nearly two decades before being listed in the course catalog. Yet, her hunger for knowledge never stopped. A student once marveled at “her views on Italian art, or paleolithic axes, or mosaic woodworking, or the earliest printed edition of Reynard the Fox,” Moore writes.

Payne-Gaposchkin is the lead character of Moore’s book. But the book is also a tale of early 20th century science and the barriers that all women at the time faced. Anyone interested in any of these topics will revel in this book’s detail.

As for Payne-Gaposchkin, while she was aware of these barriers, she didn’t see herself as a feminist pioneer. She was drawn to the stars, and the stars were blind to gender. “She did not consider herself a woman astronomer,” Moore writes. “She was an astronomer.””

“Review: What Stars Are Made Of
by Jeff Foust
Monday, March 2, 2020

What Stars Are Made Of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin
by Donovan Moore
Harvard Univ. Press, 2020
hardcover, 320 pp., illus.
ISBN 978-0-674-23737-7
US$29.95

The early 20th century was a dynamic time in astronomy and physics, with breakthroughs that reshaped our understanding of the universe and how it works. Many of the scientists who made those discoveries became famous: think of Albert Einstein and relativity, Edwin Hubble and the expansion of the universe, and Erwin Schrödinger’s advances in quantum mechanics, to name just a few.

One of the biggest discoveries that era, though, has been largely overlooked. Today, we take it for granted that hydrogen and helium constitute the vast majority of matter in the universe, and that the heavier elements we’re more familiar with are rare. But as recently as a century ago, many scientists thought that the elemental abundances of stars were the same as the Earth. Yet the astronomer who discovered just how abundant hydrogen is in the universe is largely unknown outside of the field, and often forgotten within it: Cecelia Payne.
Yet the astronomer who discovered just how abundant hydrogen is in the universe is largely unknown outside of the field, and often forgotten within it: Cecelia Payne.

What Stars Are Made Of by journalist Donovan Moore seeks to undo that oversight and shed light on the life and career of Cecelia Payne (Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin after her marriage to Russian astronomer Sergei Gaposchkin), including the many obstacles she had to overcome as a woman in a field dominated by men. The result is an engaging, enlightening biography about a key figure in astrophysics in the 20th century.

Growing up in England at the dawn of the 20th century, Payne was long interested in science and nature. She persevered despite schools that dissuaded girls from science; she got kicked out of one London school when her desire to study science and advanced mathematics became too much for administrators, but found another more willing to accommodate her interests. She then secured a scholarship to attend Cambridge University, with plans to study botany.

Payne, though, was also interested in physics, attended a lecture by Sir Arthur Eddington, who discussed his eclipse expedition that confirmed Einstein’s predictions about how gravity warped spacetime. That lecture, she later recalled, was like a “thunderclap,” and by the end of her first year decided to pursue physics. She was interested in astronomy in particular, but seeing few career options for her in England upon graduation, secured funding to go to America, to Harvard College Observatory. The observatory’s new director, Harlow Shapley, was working to more closely integrate the observatory into the university, and Payne became his first graduate student.

Payne arrived at Harvard with a topic she wanted to pursue: confirming theoretical work by an Indian physicist, Meghnad Saha, that sought to link the classification of stars developed at Harvard, based on their spectra, to their physical characteristics. She was, at the time, at the vanguard of the emerging field of astrophysics, combining astronomical observations with physics, applying knowledge of the structure of the atom to massive, distant starts..

At Harvard she had access to an extensive collection of stellar spectra, analyzing them in detail for that work, including the composition of the stars. It went well, except for two problems. One was the helium spectral signature seen in the stars could only be explained if its abundance was a thousand times greater than seen on Earth. Worse, the intensity of the hydrogen spectral lines implied it was a million times more abundant.

Those results became a sticking point when she wrote her thesis. She found no errors in the analysis that showed the abundance of hydrogen and helium, but it ran afoul of the consensus position in astronomy of the era, threatening her ability to get her doctorate and derailing Shapley’s plans to create an astronomy department at Harvard. Henry Norris Russell, who reviewed her thesis, ultimately approved it when she included a passage about the abundances that stated that they “are regarded as spurious.”
As astronomer and historian Owen Gingerich noted in the book, “it is a person who persuades his colleagues of a new result who gets the credit.”

Payne spent the rest of her career at Harvard, eventually becoming its first woman faculty member. She met Gaposchkin at an astronomy conference in Germany as he was trying to flee the country, fearing he would be jailed under the new Nazi regime. She helped him out of the country and to America, and months later they married. She passed away in 1979.

And, ultimately, she was proven right: within several years Russell himself determined that the Sun was mostly hydrogen and helium, and thus other stars were as well. Russell got the credit at the time for that “discovery” even those Payne had demonstrated it in her earlier thesis. As astronomer and historian Owen Gingerich noted in the book, “it is a person who persuades his colleagues of a new result who gets the credit.”

History, fortunately, has revised that assessment, and Payne-Gaposchkin is now widely seen as the astronomer who discovered the stars are mostly hydrogen and helium. She still, though, doesn’t have the recognition today of her contemporaries. (She was featured in an episode of the new Cosmos series in 2014, titled “Sisters of the Sun.”) What Stars Are Made Of isn’t perfect: it dwells a lot on her childhood, and speeds through much of her Harvard career after her landmark thesis. Nonetheless, it’s an important work in helping bring to light an important, but often overlooked, person in 20th century astrophysics. ”

“In the early 20th century, astronomers believed in a uniformity principle that held that all objects in the universe were made of the same elements, in approximately the same amounts. In 1925, however, Cecilia Payne, a Ph.D. student at Harvard, discovered that stars are composed of a million times more hydrogen than was previously assumed. But because she was young and female, the scientific community rejected her findings. It would take several decades before Payne-Gaposchkin received the recognition she was due. In What Stars Are Made Of, using compact and skillful prose, Donovan Moore charts Payne-Gaposchkin’s scientific life from grade school standout to world-class astronomer.

Moore includes impressive context on the misogyny that existed within British academic society at the turn of the 20th century. He notes, for example, the Cambridge University tradition wherein, when women entered a lecture hall, the roomful of men would stomp along in time with the women’s footsteps. It was a culture of discrimination that at times turned violent, as it did on 24 October 1921, when the university announced its decision to grant women “titular degrees,” and a furious mob of Cambridge men stormed the women’s college, bashing in its iron gates with a coal cart.

The reader meets physics luminaries and future Nobel Prize winners in the Cavendish laboratory, where Payne-Gaposchkin trained as an undergraduate. The lab was directed by J. J. Thomson when she arrived and Ernest Rutherford when she left. (Thomson, incidentally, believed that women “simply did not have the intellectual capacity to be world-class physicists.”) Payne-Gaposchkin was also taught by Niels Bohr, whose quantum theory of atomic structure would enable her to come to her own revolutionary conclusions.

By the end of her time at Cambridge, it had become clear to Payne-Gaposchkin that she would never be employed as an astronomer in England. So she secured a fellowship at the Harvard Observatory and moved to America. Here, she was granted research opportunities, but the discrimination she had experienced at home continued.

One of the most egregious perpetrators of this discrimination was Harvard’s president, Abbott Lawrence Lowell, who declared that Payne-Gaposchkin would never be named a professor as long as he was alive. “Lowell had tried to limit Jewish enrollment at Harvard to 15 percent, and he tried to ban black students from living in the freshman dorms. In both instances, the Harvard Board of Overseers overruled him,” writes Moore. “The board did not overrule him, however, when he decreed in 1928 that women should not receive teaching appointments from the Harvard Corporation.” Payne-Gaposchkin was devastated: “ ‘I had no official status,’ Cecilia recalled. ‘I was paid so little that I was ashamed to admit it to my relations in England.’”

Despite these and other hardships, Payne-Gaposchkin’s accomplishments were remarkable. She wrote several books and more than 270 journal articles, was elected to both the Royal and American Astronomical Societies and the American Philosophical Society, earned an honorary doctorate from Smith College, and was the first woman to receive the American Astronomical Society’s lifetime achievement award. In 1956, after Lowell’s death, she was named the first female professor at Harvard. She died just before the election that would have admitted her to the National Academy of Sciences.

To Moore, Payne-Gaposchkin was the classic driven scientist. “She endured everything from laboratory slights to classroom derision because there was no choice. She was driven to understand, which meant that nothing in the way would stop her.” This is a view Payne-Gaposchkin echoed in her own memoir: “Do not undertake a scientific career in quest of fame or money. There are easier and better ways to reach them. Undertake it only if nothing else will satisfy you; for nothing else is probably what you will receive.””

“Review: Priyamvada Natarajan on Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

On June 21, 1956, The New York Times reported, “Harvard University announced today the appointment of Dr. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin as Professor of Astronomy. She is the first woman to attain full professorship at Harvard through regular faculty promotion.”

That this was a newsworthy item for a national newspaper in 1956 is not surprising. The 2019 Report on Women in Physics and Astronomy from the American Institute of Physics notes that as of 2014, only 10 percent of all full professors were women, while African-American and Hispanic women remain acutely under-represented.

Donovan Moore’s meticulous new biography What Stars Are Made Of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin recounts the remarkable story of this unusually gifted scientist. We often wonder whether the early lives of exceptional people hold clues to their future success. Moore has deftly traced the arc of Payne-Gaposchkin’s childhood and shows us that she was indeed rather unusual from the start. A typical English schoolgirl of the time, would have “learned from her childhood that worldly success was unfeminine, and even in areas where women might achieve success, it was unfeminine to seek to earn it”—but not Cecilia. Restless by nature, she was burning with ambition and a deep desire to make an original scientific contribution.

She entered Newnham College, Cambridge, in 1919, and her timing was near-perfect for a future life in science. After the end of a horrific war, economies were on the upswing, there was a buoyant sense of optimism, and many scientific breakthroughs were set to happen, with Cambridge notably at the epicenter. Moore captures the atmosphere of Cambridge and transports the reader to its dreamy spires and lazy punting on the river Cam. At Cambridge students learn and solve problems one-on-one with a senior scientist, obliging them not only to formulate solutions but defend them against a formidable questioner. Many of Cecelia’s professors and tutors (L.J. Comrie, E.A. Milne, Arthur Eddington, Ernest Rutherford) were themselves developing new theories and making fundamental discoveries in atomic physics, astronomy, and chemistry, and she had a ringside seat at this process well before she could participate herself. Cecilia’s ability to question critically and argue the case served her well when she decided to cross the pond and move to where the action and academic opportunities were in the United States—Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She arrived in the 1920s in the midst of a momentous mapping exercise—a project to document and measure the spectrum of every star possible. Dava Sobel recounts in a recent book, The Glass Universe, the key role played in the project by “human computers,” women who were diligently analyzing the glass plates that yielded the results. Although Payne-Gaposchkin was not a “human computer” herself, she knew two of them well, Antonia Maury and Annie Jump Cannon; sadly, she did not meet the intellectual giant Henrietta Leavitt, although she inherited her desk. Leavitt’s analysis of the variability of Cepheid stars had provided a brand-new ruler to measure cosmic distances that was instrumental in the discovery of the expansion of the universe by the astronomer Edwin Hubble in 1929.”

“One of astronomy’s great minds

What Stars Are Made Of tells the story of a brilliant and altogether remarkable
astronomer who is not nearly as famous as she should be. This clear and articulate book may go some way to rectify that situation as it leads us through the circumstances that enabled her, at the age of just 25, to determine that hydrogen and helium were the main constituents of the stars. This discovery, initially rejected by the experts, was essential to making progress in understanding the formation and evolution of stars and planets, and is now among the first things taught in astrophysics classes.
We start in the south of England with Cecilia’s birth in 1900, follow her through school education, admission to Cambridge, and her move in 1923 to Harvard, where she made her most important discoveries and where she remained for the rest of her life. For each period, Moore presents us with a succinct account of the social environment, the historical events and the people she interacted with, evoking a lucid picture of the influences on Cecilia.”

“‘What Stars Are Made Of’ Review: A Life in Eclipse
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin cracked the secret of the stars’ composition but got scant credit for years.
By Marcia Bartusiak
March 27, 2020 1050 am ET
Edwin Hubble, architect of the modern universe, called her “the best man at Harvard,” a decided compliment for a woman in the 1920s. Indeed, if Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin had been born the opposite sex, she would surely have been offered a professorship shortly after completing her exceptional Ph.D. dissertation in astronomy. Instead, Harvard officials waited more than three decades before bestowing that honor.
But Payne-Gaposchkin belongs in the scientific pantheon. She was one of the first astronomers to apply the new laws of atomic physics to astronomical bodies and in 1925 uncovered the first hint that hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe. This was an astounding discovery that echoes down the corridors of astronomy to this day. Here is the fuel for a star’s persistent burning; here is the gaseous tracer that enables radio astronomers to probe a long- hidden universe; here is debris from the first few minutes of the universe’s creation in a big bang.

Payne-Gaposchkin at the Harvard College Observatory, which she joined in 1923. PHOTO: ALAMY STOCK PHOTO
WHAT STARS ARE MADE OF
By Donovan Moore
Harvard, 298 pages, $29.

That is why “What Stars Are Made Of” is a welcome addition to the astronomical literature. Other histories have included a chapter or two on Payne-Gaposchkin’s work; her daughter, Katherine Haramundanis, had her mother’s memoir published nearly 40 years ago. But
Donovan Moore, a former newspaper reporter and television producer, has produced the first full-length biography, a beautifully written and well-researched study. Handling the science with a light but deft touch, Mr. Moore primarily focuses on this astronomer’s personal life, the office politics and the struggles one woman of science faced in the first half of the 20th century.
Born in 1900, the eldest of three siblings, Cecilia Helena Payne grew up in the Buckinghamshire village of Wendover and later London. Tall, broad-shouldered and often dowdily attired, she was teased for being the smartest student in the class, years ahead of her peers. Her school’s chemistry lab became her chapel, “where she would steal away, alone, to conduct her own worship service,” writes Mr. Moore. Though painfully shy, she was still immensely curious, stubborn and willful. Kicked out of one school, she found another that encouraged her scientific interests and helped her gain a scholarship to Cambridge University.
Cambridge, then the world’s mecca of science, had always been her goal, and the year she arrived on campus—1919—was crucial to her fate. Originally intending to major in botany, Payne chanced upon a ticket to hear British astronomer Arthur Eddington announce the results of his historic solar-eclipse expedition, which confirmed Einstein’s general theory of relativity. The event, she later recalled, was a “thunderclap” that encouraged her to switch majors to physics.
As she neared graduation, though, she knew that her only career choice in Great Britain would be school teaching. A sympathetic Cambridge astronomer suggested she go to the female- friendly Harvard College Observatory, where a bevy of women—called “computers”—were cataloging and analyzing astronomy’s greatest collection of photographic plates. Payne wrote a heartfelt letter to the observatory’s director, Harlow Shapley, and secured a fellowship. It didn’t hurt that one of her letters of recommendation stated that “she would not want to run away after a few years training to get married.”
In the fall of 1923, she arrived in Massachusetts with a plan: She would use Harvard’s hundreds of thousands of plates to verify a new equation, developed by Indian physicist Meghnad Saha, that related a star’s temperature and pressure to the wavelengths of light it radiates. More than that, she wanted to compute the relative abundances of various elements found in the atmosphere of stars.
It was grueling and tedious work, with her chain-smoking all the way. She pored over the photos for months, “collecting and classifying the celestial flora” and trying to interpret smeary spectral lines, while Shapley pressured her to produce results. Silicon was her savior; she was able to make out how this element ionized in four stages, allowing her to calculate the temperature of hotter stars. From there, she began to work on abundances, which led to an infamous snag.
Helium appeared to be a thousand times more plentiful in the stars than expected. Worse than that, hydrogen was a million times more abundant than predicted. “She was treading on treacherous ground,” writes Mr. Moore. “The astronomy establishment at the time held a common strong opinion that the composition of all celestial bodies was similar. . . . that the sun and stars were composed of the same elements on earth, with the same relative abundance.” On our world, free hydrogen and helium are very scarce.
Reviewing her manuscript, Princeton astronomer Henry Norris Russell, then the dean of American astronomy, said her conclusion was “impossible.” To save her career, she backed down, editing her dissertation to say that her hydrogen and helium results were likely “spurious.” Ironically, it was Russell, using another method, who finally convinced the astronomical community four years later that hydrogen was indeed the prime element in the cosmos (and long got the credit for it).

Even though Payne had written what has been described as “the most brilliant thesis ever written in astronomy,” Shapley promoted Payne merely to technical assistant with little pay. And yet she was still required to teach like a professor. She acquiesced because she wanted to stay at Harvard, for it was there that this shy woman began to broaden her horizons both professionally and socially.
In 1933, during a trip to Europe, she met the Russian astronomer Sergei Gaposchkin, then stateless and living under the threat of Nazi persecution. Taking pity, she campaigned to get him a job at Harvard. Three months after his arrival, they married. And by 1940 they had three children, who were often found running through the observatory offices. Together the couple worked on variable stars, although there were no more great breakthroughs for her. Sergei,
flamboyant and quirky, was far less accomplished, so, as Mr. Moore notes, “she was holding down two jobs—hers and his.”
Her final triumph occurred in 1956, when she became the first woman to rise to a full professorship at Harvard. Payne-Gaposchkin recognized what it meant. Before her death in 1979, she made remarks that still resonate with women today: “I have reached a height that I should never, in my wildest dreams, have predicted 50 years ago. It has been a case of survival, not of the fittest, but of the most doggedly persistent.”
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“Breaking the glass ceiling of 20th-century astronomy

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was one of the most gifted astrophysicists of the 20th century. But as Donovan Moore shows in What Stars Are Made Of: The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, her career was hindered by what was at the time an almost insurmountable handicap: her gender. Payne-Gaposchkin pounded on astronomy’s glass ceiling, and she was the first to put major cracks in it. But in many places, the ceiling was impervious to her effort and intellect. She deserves more praise for her accomplishments than she has received, as she is far less well known than figures like Annie Jump Cannon and Henrietta Leavitt, who came just a bit before her, and Margaret Burbidge and Vera Rubin, who came after. Fortunately, Moore’s new biography of this brilliant scientist is a must-read.
Payne-Gaposchkin left the UK for Boston in 1923 with one family heirloom, her father’s violin, which she was forced to pawn while a graduate student. She should have been Harvard University’s first female recipient of a PhD in astronomy. Harvard had no astronomy depart- ment, however, and the physics department refused to admit women as degree candidates, so she was awarded her doctorate through Radcliffe College in 1925.
Later, when starting her job as a technical assistant at the Harvard College Observatory, she was given a lower salary than the male fellows. To make ends meet be- tween the end of her graduate fellowship and her first professional paycheck, she had to pawn her jewelry.
Yet her determination to learn about the universe led Payne-Gaposchkin to uncover one of its fundamental truths: that most of it is made of hydrogen. In doing so, she overturned the principle of uniformity, long held up as a law of physics, which stated that the universe was composed primarily of the same elements that dominated Earth’s crust. Her accomplishments were initially pooh-poohed by her field’s most eminent scien- tists, including her external PhD adviser Henry Norris Russell, who forced her to change the conclusion of her dissertation and say that her results must be spurious. But, as we now know, she was right.
Four years later Russell would conclude, in a paper in which he took credit for the discovery, that the stars and the universe are indeed made almost entirely of hydrogen. Well into the 1970s, Russell’s 1929 paper was regularly cited as the one that established the dominance of hydrogen in the universe. Payne-Gaposchkin’s work was important enough that a Nobel Prize should have been hers, but because of Russell, that was not to be—she was never even nominated.
Other important rewards did come her way, though often not as soon as she deserved them. Payne-Gaposchkin became the first tenured female professor of astronomy at Harvard, but only after serving three decades in the lesser position of technical assistant. That lengthy period of underemployment was no accident. Harvard president Abbott Lawrence Lowell had declared, according to Harvard College Ob- servatory director Harlow Shapley, that “Miss Payne should never have a position in the University as long as he was alive.” Lowell, who stepped down as president of Harvard in 1933 and died in 1943, was unfortunately right: Payne-Gaposchkin was only promoted to the faculty in 1956. In 1976 she became the first woman to receive the American Astronomical Society’s most prestigious honor, which, ironically for Payne-Gaposchkin, is called the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship.
Payne-Gaposchkin’s autobiography was Moore’s most important source, and so he uses her own words to tell much of her story, almost as if he wrote from a series of extended interviews with his late subject. What Stars Are Made Of flows like a historical novel, and Moore has a particular gift for weaving details about the cultural richness of early-20th-century Cambridge, Massachusetts, into his prose. Moore explains both the scientific details and the overall significance of Payne- Gaposchkin’s work clearly, and he does so without jargon. His descriptions of Payne-Gaposchkin’s Forrest Gump–like habit of running into some of the greatest physicists of the 20th century adds to the readers’ fun; her mentors and teachers included such luminaries as Niels Bohr and Ernest Rutherford.
But reading about the sacrifices Payne-Gaposchkin made, and the burdens under which she suffered, was often painful. How could my predecessors have worked so hard to undermine the work of one of the greatest minds in 20th-century astrophysics? The book also prompts uncomfortable questions about the modern scientific community. In the year 2020, women have softened most of the barriers for participation in astrophysics, but that progress is recent, and it is far from complete. Who is our modern Payne-Gaposchkin? Is that person undervalued and denied opportunities because of their gender or gender identity? Their skin color or country of birth? A disability?
Most of us in science can probably relate to one part of Payne-Gaposchkin’s story: She became a scientist because she was encouraged and inspired to do so by dedicated teachers. At age 12 her path led her to Dorothy Daglish’s science classroom at St Mary’s Catholic school. Next, at St Paul’s School for Girls, she had the good fortune of finding another inspiring and caring teacher, Ivy Pendlebury. Most, or perhaps all, of us chose a path into science because we had similar experiences. We should pause and say thank you to all of the Miss Daglishes and Miss Pendleburys we’ve been lucky enough to meet. This, then, is my chance to say thank you to Chris Tellefson, my high school physics teacher in State College, Pennsylvania, in the early 1970s, who has no idea how important her teaching, guidance, and advice were to me.
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“REACHING THE STARS

When I think about all the people I know presently involved in science – either actively working in one of the many disciplines from biology to astronomy, studying to one day do so, or working in an occupation supporting the dissemination of discoveries therein or for the greater widespread understanding thereof – the majority who most readily come to mind (including our own daughter, presently studying biochemistry and biophysics) are women. However, aspiring to be well-read in the history of science as I am, I know all too well that up until relatively recently, this was not always so. And while, in the United States, for example, the overall number of women receiving STEM degrees is now higher than that of men, in some of the fields, particularly the computer sciences, engineering, and mathematics, women continue to be in a significant minority.

Indeed, looking back only a century, when women were just beginning to enter the sciences at the university level – but for all their efforts were often not granted the degrees testifying to the completion of their studies – there were still even a number of fields from which women were all-but-outrightly barred, or in which they faced such blatant dissuasion that pursuing meaningful studies was both impractical and unprofitable. Such was the world into which Dr. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin entered when arriving at Newnham College, Cambridge in 1919. It was a world, as Donovan Moore recounts in his What Stars Are Made Of; The Life of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, in which – as well later as at Harvard University – she would repeatedly not only break through the institutional and social limitations placed upon her, she would, as the result of her inexhaustible determination and insatiable curiosity, leave barrier after barrier lying in heaps of rubble on the ground in her wake.

The eldest of three children born to an educated, upper-middle class family in Wendover, Buckinghamshire, England, Cecilia (out of respect, I will only refer to her simply by her given name in reference to her younger years) – as Mr. Moore explains – had the benefit of parents who did not believe in holding their daughters back from the acquisition of a full education. And while tragically deprived of her father at an early age due to Edward Payne’s untimely death, her mother Emma saw to it that Cecilia and her siblings were raised in an environment where education was given a very high priority.

Emma Payne having moved the family from Wendover to London when the children were still young, Cecilia attended St. Mary’s – a school for girls (at which Gustav Mahler was the teacher of music during her time there). She excelled in both the sciences as well as the humanities (indeed, her proficiency in classical Greek would one day come to be the source of much needed funding to allow her to continue her studies). But it was at Newnham where she truly began to shine.

It was from her room at Newnham one December night in 1919 that Cecilia ventured – with the officially granted permission required for a female student such as she was having been obtained to do so, it should be noted – to attend a lecture at Trinity College’s dining hall by Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington on the subject of his recently concluded observations of the solar eclipse that year that lead to the confirmation of Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. As Mr. Moore describes it, it was a night of revelation, a night during which she “had an instant recognition of a life’s calling that years later would lead to unlocking one of the great mysteries of the universe.”

To disclose that Dr. Payne-Gaposchkin is responsible for the discover of the prevalence of hydrogen in the universe is not, by any means, to spoil the story of her life; most familiar with the history of astronomy should today be aware of this fact. That she was the first woman to receive a doctorate in astronomy from Radcliffe College, the first woman promoted to a full professorship at Harvard, the first to head a department there, and among the first – female or male – to undertake the studies in the then newly emerging field of astrophysics itself, might not be so well known. And they are the milestones, along with more intimate insights into her personal life – including her marriage to Sergei Gaposchkin, her life as a working mother, and the challenges both of these posed to her scientific work – by which Mr. Moore has structured this highly readable and surprisingly lively biography (truly, one might be forgiven for not anticipating that the life story of an astrophysicist – even a particularly accomplished one – to be the subject of a work that reads as excitingly and compellingly as the biography of a much more popularly known figure).

That the name of Payne-Gaposchkin is not the natural next one mentioned following the series “Copernicus, Newton, Einstein…” when those whose works have enabled us better to understand how this universe in which we all live physically functions is indeed a unfortunate state affairs. Fortunately, it is an (to put it graciously) oversight that Donovan Moore has done much to set right in his What Stars Are Made Of. It is indeed hoped that it is a book that will find a wide readership among both the scientific as well as the popular reading communities. Indeed, it is particularly hoped that it is a book that will find its way into the hands of younger readers, to inspire them never to allow themselves to be held back – by either institutional or societal limitations – from their inspired pursuit of knowledge, for in the life story of Dr. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin it is shown that when one reaches for the stars, they can – through exceptional study and effort – actually be obtained.”