Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, American Astronomer
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (May 10, 1900 - December 7, 1979) was an English-American astronomer and astrophysicist. In 1923, after meeting Harlow Shapley, the Director of the Harvard College Observatory, who had just begun a graduate program in astronomy, she left England. In her 1925 PhD thesis, she proposed an explanation for the composition of stars in terms of the relative abundances of hydrogen and helium. In 1931, she became an American citizen. On a tour through Europe she met Russian-born astrophysicist Sergei I. Gaposchkin. She helped him get a visa to the US and they married in 1934. She studied stars of high luminosity in order to understand the structure of the Milky Way. She studied variable stars, making over 1,250,000 observations with her assistants. This work later was extended to the Magellanic Clouds, adding a further 2,000,000 observations of variable stars. These data were used to determine the paths of stellar evolution. She remained scientifically active throughout her life, spending her entire academic career at Harvard. With her appointment to the Chair of the Department of Astronomy, she became the first woman to head a department at Harvard. She died in 1979 at the age of 79. No photographer credited, undated.
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