The star who unravelled the sun

摘要

From thetime of Greek thinkerAnaxagoras in the 5th century BC until the 1920s, people thought the sun had the same composition as the Earth. Then came a woman who turned the received wisdom on its head. She wrote the greatest astronomy PhD of the 20th century. Yet hardly anyone knows her name. She was the first woman professor at Harvard yet her salary for many years was classed as "equipment expenses". She made one of the greatest astronomical discoveries of all time yet another astronomer got most of the credit. Undoubtedly, Cecilia Payne suffered for being a woman in a male-dominated profession. But her lot would have been worse had she not left Cambridge, England -where women were barred from research -and moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts. At Harvard, she found more freedom - and the vast collection of stellar spectra on which she would cut her scientific teeth.