re: #310 Anymouse 🌹🏡😷

You should go look up Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, and the attempts to suppress her figuring out that stars were made of hydrogen:

Shapley persuaded Payne to write a doctoral dissertation, and so in 1925 she became the first person to earn a PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe College of Harvard University.[5] Her thesis title was Stellar Atmospheres; A Contribution to the Observational Study of High Temperature in the Reversing Layers of Stars.[8][1]

Payne was able to accurately relate the spectral classes of stars to their actual temperatures by applying the ionization theory developed by Indian physicist Meghnad Saha. She showed that the great variation in stellar absorption lines was due to differing amounts of ionization at different temperatures, not to different amounts of elements. She found that silicon, carbon, and other common metals seen in the Sun’s spectrum were present in about the same relative amounts as on Earth, in agreement with the accepted belief of the time, which held that the stars had approximately the same elemental composition as the Earth. However, she found that helium and particularly hydrogen were vastly more abundant (for hydrogen, by a factor of about one million).[9] Her thesis concluded that hydrogen was the overwhelming constituent of stars (see Metallicity), making it the most abundant element in the Universe.[10]

However, when Payne’s dissertation was reviewed, astronomer Henry Norris Russell, who stood by the theories of American physicist Henry Rowland, dissuaded her from concluding that the composition of the Sun was predominantly hydrogen because it would contradict the current scientific consensus that the elemental composition of the Sun and the Earth were similar. In 1914, he had written in an academic article:

The agreement of the solar and terrestrial lists is such as to confirm very strongly Rowland’s opinion that, if the Earth’s crust should be raised to the temperature of the Sun’s atmosphere, it would give a very similar absorption spectrum. The spectra of the Sun and other stars were similar, so it appeared that the relative abundance of elements in the universe was like that in Earth’s crust.[11]

Payne consequently described her results as “spurious”.[8]:186[10] A few years later, astronomer Otto Struve described her work as “the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy”.[12] Russell also realized she was correct when he derived the same results by different means. In 1929, he published his findings in a paper that briefly acknowledged Payne’s earlier work and discovery, including the mention that “[t]he most important previous determination of the abundance of the elements by astrophysical means is that by Miss Payne […]”;[13] nevertheless, he is often credited for the conclusions she reached.[13][14][15]

Note that Russell gets credited with her discoveries.

en.wikipedia.org