astronomers – Sheila Crosby

Vera Rubin

December 28, 2016

Among all the more famous deaths of 2016, I want to mention Vera Rubin. She was the only person graduating with an Astronomy degree from her class in 1948. She wanted to do her PhD at Princeton, but they didn’t accept women for post grad studies at the time, so she went to Cornell. That’s where she discovered that galaxies didn’t seem to be flying straight out after the Big…

Happy Birthday Cecilia Payne

May 10, 2016

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Cecilia Payne deserves to be far more famous than she is. She discovered what the stars are made of. Cecilia was born in Wendover on May 10, 1900, so she’d be 116 today. Her father died when she was just 4 years old. She won a scholarship to Cambridge university to study botany. She switched to astronomy after a year after attending a lecture by Arthur Eddington and passed her exams,…