Cecilia Payne, the scientist who brought the patriarchy to its knees

Cecilia Payne is the name of the ferry that crosses the Strait of Gibraltar covering the Algeciras-Ceuta route, but it is also the name of an

music group from Biscay, as well as that of one of the asteroids discovered in February 1974. They are tributes that memory renders a woman of science who discovered the composition of the sun and, with it, that of the universe.

Let's talk about her and the women who helped her on her way to the stars.

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From maid to discovering the universe, and other pioneers of astronomy |

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Because in these times of feminist vindication, it is convenient to record her legacy, since Cecilia Payne was a fighting woman in a dark world of machismo as was the academic world of a century ago, when Cecilia got a scholarship to study at the Observatory from Harvard College.

Just a couple of years later, she revolutionized astronomy with a thesis where she used the ionization equation of the Indian physicist Meghnad Saha, by which the ionization state of an element is related to temperature and pressure.

With this, she Cecilia Payne resolved that stars were composed of hydrogen and helium, hydrogen being the most abundant component in the universe.

Payne revolutionized astronomy by relating the ionization state of an element to temperature and pressure.

With this, he resolved that the stars were composed of hydrogen and helium.

There is a book published by Captain Swing that brings us closer to her figure and to that of other invisible women who were employed at the Harvard College Observatory as scribes, that is, as women who wrote down the scientific observations made by men at a time when that scientific patriarchy relegated women to the background.

The book is called

and is written by Dava Sobel, whose works are most interesting.

Without going any further, in

(Anagrama, 2006), the renowned scientific communicator puts us on the trail of the planets of the solar system, letting us know their origins, using scientific as well as mythological parameters, combining astronomy with astrology, mythology with science and music with silence and biography.

In the book that concerns us here,

, Dava Sobel tells us the history of the Harvard College Observatory from the end of the 19th century, when the first women arrived, to the mid-20th century, when Cecilia Payne became the first female professor. headline.

Names like Williamina Fleming, a Scotswoman hired as a maid at first, but whose intuition led her to identify stars, or Annie Jump Cannon who devised a classification system, give us the measure of what the university environment was like. the time, when the director of the Observatory, the astronomer Edward Charles Pickering, decided to hire women following a quantitative criterion, since he paid them a lower salary than men.

The director of the Observatory, the astronomer Pickering, hired women by paying them a lower salary than men;

the group was called 'his harem', a name that went throughout the scientific community

The group of these women was referred to, with contempt, as Pickering's harem, a name that passed by word of mouth throughout the scientific community.

But over time, those women would manage to cover the mouths of all those scientists who looked down on women's work.

For this reason, when Cecilia Payne presented her thesis, the path had already been opened by all those women who in her day were hired as scribes.

However, at first, the astronomer Henry Norris Russell did not come to see with good eyes the conclusion reached by Cecilia Payne when she pointed to hydrogen as a component of stars.

Norris Russell had a hard time.

Years before, he had related the brightness of stars to temperature in what is known as the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram.

However, some time later, Norris Russell succumbed to the discovery of Cecilia Payne, defending him.

With these things, the name of Cecilia Payne shines today in every woman who undertakes the path of scientific study.

It could not be otherwise.

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