Cecilia payne-gaposchkin facts of life cast

By the latter half of the 1800s, the primary question among astronomers around the world was, “What are stars actually made of?” 

In the 1880’s, a team of Harvard researchers believed they’d answered this question.

Cecilia payne-gaposchkin facts of life cast

They had created a classification system whereby stars are rated according to their surface temperature. 

Using this rating system, the team determined that there is no significant compositional difference between our Sun (a star) and the Earth (an orbiting body).

That system (and belief) went unchallenged until 1925.

This was when a relatively unknown British-born astronomer named Cecilia Payne presented her Ph.D. thesis

It was titled, Stellar Atmospheres. In it, she suggested that Harvard astronomers were using the wrong method of classification to determine the makeup of stars.

In her landmark thesis, Payne demonstrated how to decode the complicated spectra of starlight in order to learn the relative amounts of the chemical elements within