Cecilia Payne is the name of the ferry that crosses the Strait of Gibraltar covering the Algeciras-Ceuta route, but it is also the name of a music group indie Biscayan, as well as one of the asteroids discovered in February 1974. They are tributes that memory pays to a woman scientist who discovered the composition of the sun and, with it, that of the universe. Let’s talk about her and the women who helped her on her way to the stars.
Because in these times of feminist vindication, it is convenient to record her legacy, since Cecilia Payne was a fighting woman in a dark world of machismo as was the academic world of a century ago, when Cecilia got a scholarship to study at the Observatory from Harvard College. Just a couple of years later, she revolutionized astronomy with a thesis where she used the ionization equation of Indian physicist Meghnad Saha, by which the ionization state of an element is related to temperature and pressure. With this, Cecilia Payne resolved that stars were composed of hydrogen and helium, hydrogen being the most abundant component in the universe.
Payne revolutionized astronomy by relating the ionization state of an element to temperature and pressure. With this, he resolved that the stars were composed of hydrogen and helium.
There’s a book published by Captain Swing that brings us closer to her figure and that of other invisible women who were employed at the Harvard College Observatory as scribes, that is, as women who wrote down the scientific observations made by men at a time when the scientific patriarchy relegated the woman in the background. The book is titled the crystal universe and it is written by Dava Sobel, whose works are most interesting. Without going any further, in The planets (Anagram, 2006), the renowned science communicator puts us on the trail of the planets of the solar system, letting us know their origins, using scientific as well as mythological parameters, combining astronomy with astrology, mythology with science, and music with silence and biography.
In the book that concerns us here, the crystal universeDava Sobel tells us the story of the Harvard College Observatory from late 19th century, when the first women arrived, until the mid-20th century, when Cecilia Payne became the first full professor. Names like Williamina Fleming, a Scotswoman hired as a maid at first, but whose intuition led her to identify stars, or Annie Jump Cannon who devised a classification system, give us the measure of what the university environment was like. the time, when the director of the Observatory, the astronomer Edward Charles Pickering, decided to hire women following a quantitative criterion, since he paid them a lower salary than men.
The director of the Observatory, the astronomer Pickering, hired women by paying them a lower salary than men; the group was called ‘his harem’, a name that went throughout the scientific community
The group of these women was referred to, with contempt, as Pickering’s harem, a name that passed by word of mouth throughout the scientific community. But over time, those women would manage to cover the mouths of all those scientists who looked down on women’s work. For this reason, when Cecilia Payne presented her thesis, the path had already been opened by all those women who in her day were hired as scribes.
However, at first, the astronomer Henry Norris Russell did not come to see with good eyes the conclusion reached by Cecilia Payne when she pointed to hydrogen as a component of stars. Norris Russell had a hard time. Years before, he had related the brightness of stars to temperature in what is known as the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.
However, some time later, Norris Russell succumbed to the discovery of Cecilia Payne, defending him. With these things, the name of Cecilia Payne shines today in every woman who undertakes the path of scientific study. It could not be otherwise.
the stone ax is a section where Montero GlezWith a desire for prose, he exerts his particular siege on scientific reality to show that science and art are complementary forms of knowledge.
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