EEighty-five years ago, a few dozen leading astronomers posed for a photo outside the newly built McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis, Texas. All were men – with one exception. Half hidden by a man in front of her, the face of a lonely woman can only be made out in the grainy black and white image.
This is Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, whose impact on our understanding of the cosmos has been profound. She showed that stars were made primarily of hydrogen and helium, contradicting the scientific orthodoxy of the 1920s, which held that they were made of a variety of elements. Her claims were suppressed and her work obscured, like her image in the McDonald Observatory photo.
“You can see what she was up against from that photo taken in 1939,” said Meg Weston-Smith, a family friend of the Gaposhkins. “Astronomy, like so much else, was a man’s world.”
In the end, the ideas of Payne-Gaposchkin – who was born in Britain and is married to a Russian scientist, Sergei Gaposchkin – prevailed, although not without considerable opposition from male colleagues, as revealed in a new play, The lightest elementby Stella Feehily, which opens at the Hampstead Theater this week.
“She was essentially up against a men’s club,” says Feehilly. “Astronomers, almost all of them male, have all agreed that the stars and the universe must be made of the same elements as we find on Earth. Being a woman and outside the group, she was free to be more radical in her thinking. She was right and they were wrong. The cosmos is 98% hydrogen and helium.”
Nor was Payne-Gaposchkin alone who was initially scorned for being a female astronomer and only now recognized for her brilliance. Annie Maunder and Alice Everett, who were among the first women to earn a living in astronomy in the 19th century, recently had asteroids named after them.
In addition, the largest camera in the world – which is being unveiled in Chile and will be used to image the entire visible sky every three to four nights starting next year – has been named the Vera C Rubin Observatory. Rubin, who was American, played a critical role in revealing that our universe appears to be permeated with mysterious, undetectable particles. It is dark matter and it played a key role in the evolution of the universe.
Like all female students at Cambridge until 1948, Maunder and Everett were not awarded degrees despite passing their examinations with distinction; during her education and career, Rubin suffered widespread discrimination. Even after gaining fame, she was prevented from using the large Palomar Observatory to continue her groundbreaking research because it had no bathrooms for women. Rubin’s “solution” was to stick a piece of paper in the shape of a skirt on top of the man symbol on the bathroom door.
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“Rubin’s name was regularly at the top of the list of potential Nobel winners, but to the Nobel committee she was invisible,” notes Shohini Ghose in her book His SpaceHer Time: How Groundbreaking Women Scientists Decoded the Hidden Universe.
Rubin received some compensation when she was finally awarded the gold medal by the Royal Astronomical Society in 1996. However, the only other woman to receive the award before her was Caroline Herschel – in 1828. As Ghose puts it, the 168-year gap in recognizing female astronomers was “a ridiculously long stretch”.
Since the turn of this century, more women have pursued careers in astronomy, although the profession still remains predominantly male, says Sue Bowler, journal editor of the Royal Astronomical Society. “’When you go to meetings on related topics like atmospheric physics, you find the audience is 50-50 male-female. But at some astronomy meetings, it can be as low as 10% women. I don’t really know why that is.”
Other signs point to some movement to recognize female astronomers. In 2020, American scientist Andrea Ghez became the first female astronomer to win a Nobel Prize in physics for her work on the discovery of a supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. Since only four other women have ever won the Physics Nobel, it can hardly be described as groundbreaking.
In contrast, there is a long list of female astronomers who campaigners believe should have won Nobels but were denied. Examples include Vera Rubin as well as Jocelyn Bell Burnell, who played a key role in identifying the first pulsar stars, but was denied a Nobel, which instead went to her Cambridge colleagues Antony Hewish and Martin Ryle. The decision continues to cause controversy.
“It was the first Nobel Prize ever awarded for astronomical observations and Bell Burnell should have had a share, I have no doubt about that,” says Feehily. “Having done my research on this, what surprises me is not that things have changed, but how in so many ways they haven’t changed enough.
“In the end, Payne-Gaposchkin prevailed. We now know, thanks to her, that most of the matter in the universe is hydrogen and helium. She was the first person to prove this – although it took a long time for her work to be recognized for its remarkable quality. She still had to fight to get her proper recognition and it is important to remember the struggle she had to endure.”
