Born on May 10th 1900 in Wendover, United Kingdom, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was an astronomer who attended St Paul's Girls' School as a teen. At St Paul's Girls' School she received a scholarship for Newnham College (a women-only constituent of Cambridge University) where she studied botany, physics, and chemistry. While at college, she went to astronomer Arthur Eddington’s public lecture on his trip to observe the 1919 solar eclipse, which proved Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity. This lecture sparked her interest in astronomy.
After completing her studies at Cambridge, Payne did not receive a degree because she was a woman. She realized that she didn’t have any career options in the UK and moved to the US in 1923. In the US she met Harlow Shapley, who was the new director of the Harvard College Observatory, and he offered her a graduate fellowship. At that…show more content… By attaching a spectroscope to a telescope, astronomers can spread starlight out into a rainbow of colors. In 1859, Gustav Kirchoff and Robert Bunsen had discovered that each element has its own characteristic set of spectral lines and the visible universe is made of the same elements as the ones on Earth. By the time Payne got to Harvard Annie Jump Cannon had already sorted the spectra of several hundred thousand stars into seven distinct classes. Payne immediately began a project to measure the absorption lines in stellar spectra, along with Russian astronomer Sergei Gaposchkin who she would later marry, and two years later she had her thesis: "Stellar Atmospheres, A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars". She showed in it that the wide variation in
