The Brilliant Thesis of Cecilia Payne

The November portrait of Henry Norris Russell incorrectly describes him as having demonstrated that “the sun was mostly made up of hydrogen.” In fact, he discouraged Cecilia Payne (later Payne-Gaposchkin) from making that claim in her dissertation. Unfortunately, the astronomical community for years remembered his retraction four years later more than her thesis, although he did give her credit at that time. Forty years later, Otto Struve described her work as “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”