100 years ago, Cecilia Payne was completing the draft of her PhD thesis “Stellar Atmospheres; A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars“. It would change all of astrophysics.
On 4th January 1925 she spoke to Henry Norris Russell about the draft looking for advice. 10 days later he responded to say her findings must be wrong “It is clearly impossible that hydrogen should be a million times more abundant than the metals …”.
Later in January, she wrote to her friend about Russell “I shall not be afraid personally of him any more. (His power in the astronomical world is another matter, and I shall fear that to my dying day, as the fate of such as I could be sealed by him with a word.)” and reflecting in an interview that “Henry Norris Russell talked me out of” keeping her original conclusions.
Cecilia amended her draft and commented “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.” Russell’s own paper 4 years later recognised that hydrogen and helium were indeed the most abundant elements in the Sun; the paper included a reference to Cecilia’s PhD.
Cecilia’s doctoral thesis was accepted in April 1925 and she became the first person to earn a PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe College of Harvard University.
Nearly 4 decades later in a review of prior astronomical research, world renown astronomer Otto Struve described her work as “the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy”