Star Women

“Star Women” by Pacalin

Three astronomers who changed our understanding of the stars.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt developed a system for measuring distances in the cosmos by tracking the luminosity of stars. Annie Jump Cannon classified hundreds of thousands of stars, and her system is still in use today. Cecilia Payne found the temperature scale of stars by understanding the abundances of hydrogen and helium in them, and her ‘Stellar Atmospheres’ is widely acknowledged as the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.