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by drfuchs
2509 days ago
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As a Ph.D. candidate at Radcliffe, Cecilia Payne discovered that, contrary to accepted theory of the time, stars (and the universe) are mostly hydrogen, and not the same mix of stuff here on earth. Established astronomer Henry Norris Russell reviewed her thesis and got her to drop this conclusion; then he published the same result later, and is typically credited with its discovery. |
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When Russell published the same result later, here's one thing he said: "The most important previous determination of the abundance of the elements by astrophysical means is that by Miss Payne, who determined, by Milne's method of marginal appearances, the relative abundance of eighteen of the most important elements." He shows Payne's figures and remarks on how gratifying it is that his numbers agree with hers, given that the methods used to obtain them are so different.
Payne's numbers that Russell compares against include the figure for hydrogen, and indeed that figure does appear in her thesis. So she didn't drop it entirely. What she did do was to add this sentence: "Although hydrogen and helium are manifestly very abundant in stellar atmospheres, the actual values derived from the estimates of marginal appearance are regarded as spurious."
So it's not that Russell suppressed Payne's research and then tried to claim it as his own. She asked him to look at her thesis. He said it was good but that he didn't believe the figure for the abundance of hydrogen. (Nor, I think, would many other astronomers at the time have done.) She published the thesis including her estimate of the abundance of hydrogen, but said that that's "regarded as spurious." Russell continued to work on this stuff (it was already a focus of his research, which is why she sent her thesis to him in the first place) and eventually the evidence became so overwhelming that he changed his mind; when he wrote up a paper presenting that evidence, he credited Payne with having got all the numbers right before he did. None of that seems very bad.
If it's true that Russell is typically credited with the discovery that stars are mostly hydrogen, then that's grossly unfair. I don't know how we could determine whether it's because of sexism or because at the time Russell was incredibly eminent and Payne was a new PhD. (Is it true? If I do a web search for <<henry norris russell discovered abundance hydrogen stars>>, which seems like if anything it should oversample claims that Russell made the discovery, almost all the resulting documents give credit to Payne. Maybe things on the web tend to be very recent and she's been less unfairly neglected lately?)