In 1925, a twenty-five-year-old graduate student calculated that the Sun is made almost entirely of hydrogen.
Her supervisor told her the finding was “clearly impossible.”
She believed him.
She added a line to her own thesis calling her own discovery “almost certainly not real.”
Four years later, Henry Norris Russell reached the same conclusion using a different method.
The field gave him the credit.
Tuesday we talk about Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin — the woman who figured out what stars are made of, and was talked into doubting her own genius.
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