Phew! It sure is hot out today. I could use a nice, cold glass of water to cool down.
[Squeaks squeaks]
What an amazing star our Sun is.
Even though it’s way out in space, it can still make us feel so hot!
[Squeaks squeaks]
That’s a great question! We know the Sun is a star, but what is it made of?
And how do we know that when it’s too far away—and too hot—for us to study up close?
Well, it turns out that we can thank Dr. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin for that!
She figured out what the Sun is made of back in the 1920s.
You see, back in 1900, everyone thought that stars like our Sun were made of the same stuff as the Earth, just… hotter.
Like, they thought stars had a lot of iron in them—a heavy and hard material found in rocks.
After all, there’s a ton of iron here on Earth, and we use it all sorts of ways,
like to make buildings stronger and in really tough frying pans.
But then, a girl named Cecilia Payne was born in England.
She grew up loving science. And by the time she was finishing college,
she knew she wanted to be an astronomer, or someone who studies space.
The trouble is, to do that, Ms. Payne needed even more school.
And at that time, the people in charge of the universities in England wouldn't let
women study space because they didn't think women could be good astronomers.
Boy, would she prove them wrong!
She wasn’t about to let anyone stop her from pursuing her dreams.
So, in 1923, Ms. Payne moved to the United States to go to Radcliffe College—
an entire school for women taught by Harvard University professors.
Then, in just two years, she figured out that astronomers were wrong about what stars like the Sun are made of!
And she did it by looking at the color of their light.
[Squeaks squeaks]
Well, sure, sunlight looks white or maybe a little yellow overall.
But really, it’s made of a bunch of different colors of light mixed together.
It’s kind of like how, if you mix blue and red paint, you get purple.
Except, with light, if you mix a bunch of colors, you actually get white!
Ms. Payne was able to look at all the different
colors of light coming from the Sun using a special telescope.
And because of what she learned in school,
she could use those colors like a code to figure out what the Sun was made of.
The thing is, though, doing this is actually pretty hard if you don’t have a computer to help you.
And no one had those back in 1923, when Ms. Payne started at Radcliffe.
Which is why no one had done the work she decided to do!
She had to be really careful and focused as she worked, but her attention to detail paid off.
She discovered that, unlike Earth—which is made of many things, including a lot of iron—
stars like the Sun are mostly made of just two things.
They’re made of something called hydrogen,
which you can find on Earth, but it’s usually mixed with other things.
And they’re made of helium—the same stuff that makes balloons float!
All that careful work was more than enough to show Ms. Payne’s teachers and her school
that she was a great scientist and astronomer.
So, at 25 years old, she earned the highest kind of college degree you can get: a PhD.
And when people earn a PhD, we call them a doctor.
So Ms. Payne officially became Dr. Cecilia Payne — and the first person to earn a PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe College.
[Squeaks squeaks]
Right? She was super cool.
Other astronomers didn’t believe her amazing findings right away, though.
Some even called them “impossible”!
And it took Dr. Payne years to convince them that she was right.
Part of the reason for that was that she was a woman,
and at the time, many important scientists still didn’t believe
that a woman could be a great astronomer. Which, obviously, was super wrong and unfair.
Eventually, though, the rest of the astronomers came around.
And in 1956, the now-married Dr. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin became
the first woman full professor at Harvard University and the head of the whole team that studied astronomy!
Today, people remember her as the incredible astronomer who discovered what the stars were made of,
and in doing so, changed the way we think about space forever.
[Squeaks squeaks]
Yeah, she was a pretty amazing scientist.
And it just goes to show that if you believe in yourself and work hard,
you can achieve great things.
Yeah, I feel pretty cooled off, too. So let’s go back out and enjoy the sun!
Thanks for learning about Dr. Payne-Gaposchkin and how she discovered what the Sun is made of!
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Bye for now!