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John (bird whisperer)
John (bird whisperer)
stfuconservatives: From Wikipedia: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (May 10, 1900 – December 7, 1979) was an English-American astronomer who in 1925 was first to show that the Sunis mainly composed of hydrogen, contradicting accepted wisdom at the time. … Shapley persuaded Cecilia Payne to write a doctoral dissertation, and so in 1925 she became the first... - http://dendroica.tumblr.com/post...
stfuconservatives: From Wikipedia: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (May 10, 1900 – December 7, 1979) was an English-American astronomer who in 1925 was first to show that the Sunis mainly composed of hydrogen, contradicting accepted wisdom at the time. … Shapley persuaded Cecilia Payne to write a doctoral dissertation, and so in 1925 she became the first person to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe (now part of Harvard) for her thesis: “Stellar Atmospheres, A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars”. Astronomer Otto Struve characterized it as “undoubtedly the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy”. By applying the ionization theory developed by Indian physicist Megh Nad Saha she was able to accurately relate the spectral classes of stars to their actual temperatures. She showed that the great variation in stellar absorption lines was due to differing amounts of ionization that occurred at different temperatures, and not due to the different abundances of elements. She correctly suggested that silicon, carbon, and other common metals seen in the Sun were found in about the same relative amounts as on Earth, but that helium and particularly hydrogen were vastly more abundant (by about a factor of one million in the case of hydrogen). Her thesis thus established that hydrogen was the overwhelming constituent of the stars. When her dissertation was reviewed, she was dissuaded by Henry Norris Russell from concluding that the composition of the Sun is different from the Earth, which was the accepted wisdom at the time. However, Russell changed his mind four years later when other evidence emerged. After Payne-Gaposchkin was proven correct Russell was often given the credit.” Cecilia Payne wrote several books, including: “Stars of High Luminosity” (1930) “Variable Stars and Galactic Structure” (1954) “The Galactic Novae” (1957) “Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin: an autobiography and other recollections” (1984) ed. Katherine Haramundanis All of these books have been added to the STFU Conservatives bookstore. I made a new category called “Great Ladies of Science,” so if you have any suggestions for it let me know! -Jess
April 24, 2012 from Tumblr - Comment - Share