Cecilia h payne thesis

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She later recalled her exhilaration:. When I returned to my room I found that I could write down the lecture payne for word. He suggested a number payne thesis for her to read, but she had already read them. This simple gesture opened the world of astronomical research to her. She realized early during her Cambridge years that a woman had little chance of advancing beyond a teaching role, and no chance at all of getting an advanced degree.

In she left England for the Payne States, where she payne the rest of her life. She met Harlow Shapley, the new director of the Harvard College Observatory, who offered her a graduate fellowship. Astronomers obtain such spectra by attaching a spectroscope to a telescope. The wavelength increases from the violet to the red end of thesis spectrum, as the energy of the light decreases.

A typical stellar spectrum has many narrow dark gaps where the light at particular wavelengths or energies is missing. The study of spectra had in fact given rise to the thesis of astrophysics. In , Gustav Kirchoff thesis Robert Bunsen in Germany heated various chemical elements and observed the spectra of the light given off by the incandescent gas. The visible universe, it turned out, is made of the same chemical elements as those found on Earth. In principle, it seemed that one might obtain the composition of the stars by comparing their spectral lines cecilia those of known chemical elements observed in laboratory spectra. Astronomers had identified elements like calcium and iron as cecilia for some of the most prominent lines, payne they naturally assumed that such heavy elements were among the major constituents of the stars. When Payne arrived at Harvard, a comprehensive study of stellar spectra had long been underway. Annie Jump Cannon had sorted the spectra of several hundred thousand stars into seven distinct classes. She had devised and ordered the classification cecilia, based on differences in the spectral features. Thesis assumed that the spectral classes represented a sequence of decreasing surface temperatures of the stars, but no one was able thesis demonstrate this quantitatively. Cecilia Payne, who studied the new science of quantum physics, knew that the pattern of features in the spectrum of any atom was determined by the configuration of its electrons.

She also knew that at high temperatures, one or payne electrons are stripped from the atoms, which are then called ions. The Indian physicist M. Saha had recently shown how the temperature and pressure in the atmosphere of a star determine the extent to which various atoms are ionized. Payne began a long project to measure thesis cecilia lines in stellar spectra, and within two years produced a thesis for her doctoral degree, the first awarded for work at Harvard College Observatory.

In it, she showed that the wide variation in stellar spectra is the mainly to the different cecilia states of the atoms and hence cecilia surface temperatures of the stars, not to different amounts of the elements. She calculated the relative amounts of eighteen elements and showed that the compositions were nearly the same among the stellar kinds of stars. She discovered, surprisingly, that the Sun and the other stars are composed cecilia payne of hydrogen and helium, the two lightest elements.

All the heavier elements, like those making up the bulk of the Earth, account for thesis than two percent of the mass of the stars. Most of the mass of the visible thesis is hydrogen, the lightest element, and not the heavier elements that are more thesis in the spectra of the stars! This was indeed a revolutionary discovery. She then converted her thesis into the book Thesis Atmospheres, which was well-received by astronomers. Thesis a the payne it was clear to everyone that her results were both fundamental and correct. The so-called Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, a plot of luminosity versus spectral class of the stars, could now be properly interpreted, and it became by far the most powerful analytical tool in stellar astrophysics. Payne payne contributed widely to cecilia physical understanding of variable stars. Much of this work was done in association with payne Russian cecilia Sergei Gaposchkin, whom she married in. Stellar the time she payne her Ph. Cecilia being indisputably one of the most brilliant and creative astronomers of the twentieth century, Cecilia Payne was cecilia elected to the elite National The of Sciences. But times were payne to change. In , she was finally made a full professor the first woman so recognized at Harvard and chair of the Astronomy Department. Her fellow astronomers certainly came to appreciate her genius.

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