Section
Caroline Herschel, Annie Jump Cannon's catalog work, Vera Rubin's spiral arms, the forgotten career of Petronila Astengo.
History
On a 1930 steamer voyage from Madras to Southampton, an eighteen-year-old Indian physics student calculated the maximum mass of a stable white dwarf. The result was rejected, at length and in public, by Arthur Eddington.
History
In her 1925 Radcliffe doctoral thesis, Cecilia Payne demonstrated that the stars were made overwhelmingly of hydrogen. She was persuaded, against her own data, to soften the claim.
History
Hired as Edward Pickering's housekeeper in 1879, Williamina Fleming became, by 1898, the curator of astronomical photographs at Harvard and a discoverer of the Horsehead Nebula.
History
In a brief 1912 note from Harvard, Henrietta Swan Leavitt established the relationship that would give astronomy its first reliable yardstick beyond the Milky Way.
History
Between 1898 and 1924, working from a small private observatory in Rosario, Argentina, Petronila Astengo recorded variable-star observations that ended up, mostly unattributed, in the Harvard archives.
History
Through the 1970s, working at Kitt Peak and Lowell Observatories with a young instrument builder named Kent Ford, Vera Rubin measured the rotation of spiral galaxies and forced a question that had been avoidable for forty years.
History
Between 1911 and 1924, working from glass plates at the Harvard College Observatory, Annie Jump Cannon classified the spectra of roughly 350,000 stars. The system she settled on is still used.
History
In a small garden at Slough, between domestic duties and a brother's instructions, Caroline Herschel discovered eight comets and built the first independent career in astronomy held by a woman.