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Giving women astronomers their due

Whose names we forget when we look at the stars?

In 1923 Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin completed her studies of astronomy at the University of Cambridge. But she could not get a degree. For one simple reason: she was a woman. In the 1920s England, such a thing as a woman astronomer just didn’t exist.

Think about it: this was only a hundred years ago. Sure, we’ve come a long way since regarding gender equality, but I still bet you don’t know that Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin made one of the biggest discoveries in the history of astronomy.

And she wasn’t the only one. Who are these women whose groundbreaking research forever changed our understanding of the universe, but whose names were forgotten by history?

Edward Charles Pickering, director of the Harvard Observatory, had a problem. He needed more people. And fast. The astronomers working for him spent night after night gathering large amounts of data on the stars they were observing. But he didn’t have enough staff who would look over and catalog this data.

This was 1881 Harvard College in the United States. Pickering couldn’t afford to hire more astronomers. He was also doubting the efficiency of some of the people working for him, especially his assistant who was tasked to classify stars.

So he had a brilliant idea: He would hire women astronomers, who he would have to pay much less than men, to do this analytical part of the job.

In America, unlike England, women were allowed to become astronomers since the 1870s. They were, however, barred from operating telescopes and were usually charged with what were perceived boring and monotonous tasks.

Pickering gathered around him a group of young women astronomers, who would soon become known as the Harvard computers. Six days a week, these women would painstakingly study and catalog the data sent over by their male colleagues.

By 1918 when Pickering retired, more than 80 women had worked on the project. They created a system to classify stars which is still in use today. They also made some truly spectacular discoveries that nobody, not even Pickering himself, had anticipated.

One of these astronomers was Henrietta Swan Leavitt.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt started working at the Harvard College Observatory at the turn of the last century. While studying the gathered data, she made a discovery that let us determine the scale of the universe.

She discovered a relationship between the luminosity and the period of a particular types of stars, called the Cepheid variables. She noticed that 25 of these stars in the Small Magellanic cloud would brighten and dim periodically.

Leavitt was able to measure the period of each star and determine that the brighter the Cepheid, the longer its period. As she figured out how bright a star was, she could also determine how far away it was.

Her discovery enabled astronomers to accurately measure distances to galaxies tens of millions of light-years away which was previously impossible.

Leavitt’s groundbreaking research would change astronomy. It provided confirmation that what were considered simple nebulae, were actually entire galaxies on their own, very far from our Milky Way. Edwin Hubble’s discovery that the universe is expanding was also only made possible by Leavitt’s research.

After the University of Cambridge refused to give her a degree at the end of her studies, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin realized she had no future as an astronomer in England. So in 1923, she set sail for the other Cambridge, the one in the United States, and joined the group of Harvard computers.

Just two years later, she became the first person to earn a PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe College of Harvard University. Based on the data she observed and studied, she made a spectacular discovery: she realized that stars, the composition of which had puzzled scientists for a long time, were mainly just balls of hydrogen and helium.

Although this amazing finding went completely against current beliefs, she decided to put it into her PhD thesis.

An eminent astronomer at the time Henry Norris Russell was very opposed to her conclusions. He was convinced the Sun consisted of mainly the same elements as the Earth.

A few years later, he realized that Payne was right. He published a paper in which he admired and acknowledged Payne’s work. But he is still often credited for the conclusions she reached.

In the 1960s, Vera Rubin had an ambitious goal: she wanted to weigh galaxies. For this she needed the best telescope available at the time. So she teamed up with her colleague Kent Ford and applied to use the Palomar Observatory in California.

At the time, women were still considered too fragile to handle big instruments like telescopes. Not accepting no for an anwser, she became the first woman allowed to observe at the Palomar Observatory.

She was trying to figure out how fast stars spin inside galaxies. Newton gravity tells us that bodies spin faster around heavier objects. If the Sun was heavier, the Earth would go faster around it. The spinning velocity of stars in a galaxy could therefore tell us how massive the galaxy is.

What she and Kent discovered was very surprising.

According to beliefs at the time, the stars at the center of the galaxy should spin faster than those at the edge. But this wasn’t what Rubin observed at all. The stars at the edge were spinning just as fast as those in the center. What’s more, the combined mass of visible stars wasn’t enough to hold the galaxy together. There was a large amount of mass missing.

There was only one explanation: there must be some other, invisible matter out there. And this was true for every galaxy they looked at.

In the 1930s, the same idea was put forward by a Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky. He dubbed this invisible matter ‘dark matter’. But his finding went largely unnoticed and was ignored by the scientific society.

But Rubin confirmed his discovery. Thanks largly to her work, scientists now believe that only about 20% of matter in the universe is visible. The other 80% is dark matter.

Before being struck down by cancer at the age of forty, Tinsley became known as the world’s leading expert on the aging and evolution of galaxies.

Using new methods and data, she proved that galaxies are not isolated blobs of starlight. They are dynamic centers of energy and radiation, influencing and being influenced by the surrounding cosmos.

At the time, the fate of the universe was a big enigma in cosmology. Would the universe keep expanding forever? Or would gravity eventually make it shrink back down?

American astronomer Allan Sandage favored the idea of a Big Crunch, supported by his findings. But this idea was based on a presumption that certain galaxies were static and not changing much over time.

While simulating the evolution of billions of stars in galaxies, Tinsley discovered that these galaxies were not at all constant. They would dim with age as the stars in them evolved.

This suggested that the universe would expand forever and went completely against Sandage’s findings. Sandage ignored her discovery. He liked too much the idea of a cyclic universe, starting with a Big Bang and ending with a Big Crunch.

Years later, however, he reached a similar conclusion, and wrote that “The universe has only happened once”.

In 1967, at the age of 24, Jocelyn Bell noticed an anomaly in her observations. She was analyzing data on quasars during her graduate studies in radio astronomy at Cambridge University.

But the signal she noticed did not fit with the patterns produced by quasars. She established that this strange signal was pulsing with great regularity, at a rate of about one pulse every one and a third seconds.

What she discovered was the very first rapidly rotating neutron star, one of the strangest objects in the universe. Today we know these stars as pulsars, short for “pulsating radio waves”.

Pulsars are very small, very dense and very rapidly spinning bodies, left behind after the death of a massive star. Today scientists use them to test some of the most fundamental theories in physics and to detect gravitational waves.

Bell’s discovery was dubbed as one of the most significant scientific achievements of the 20th century and was awarded the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics. But she was not the recipient of the prize. It went to her thesis supervisor Antony Hewish, whom Bell had had a tough time convincing at first to take her strange signal seriously.

Bell was not put down by this omission and humbly rejected the critics. Later in life, she was awarded an array of awards and honors for her numerous achievements in radio astronomy and electromagnetic spectrum.

Throughout their career, these women and their peers faced numerous obstacles solely because of their gender. They had to persevere through sexism, skepticism, criticism, discouragements and humiliations. None of them ever won the Nobel Prize for her achievements, although many thought they should.

The star classification system was created by the Harvard computers under the leadership of one of them, Annie Jump Cannon. But it doesn’t carry her name. It is known as the Harvard Classification Scheme.

The relationship between the period and luminosity of Cepheid variables discovered by Leavitt has been known for a century as the Period–Luminosity Relation. Only recently have we started calling it The Leavitt’s Law.

Large Synoptic Survey Telescope which is currently under construction in Chile was recently renamed to Vera C. Rubin Observatory.

There is some evidence that things are moving in the right direction. But we still have light-years to go before we can talk about gender equality in astronomy, and in science in general.

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