This is the 100 year anniversary of humans having an idea of what the heck the sun and all the stars actually are. If you had asked a leading astronomer in 1925 what the sun was, they would say that it's basically the same as Earth, but very hot.
In Cecilia Payne's doctoral thesis she was the first to say, from spectral data, that the sun was overwhelmingly made of hydrogen and helium.
It was later described as "the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy".
@wikkit @wettpaynt
The Sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma. The sun's not simply made out of gas.
Forget that song. They got it wrong.
That thesis has been rendered invalid
@stephenhomewood That's a great video!
You may not realize that my toot is quoting the song where they do just this:
https://youtu.be/sLkGSV9WDMA?si=OSY3I93VeVG5rdAL
@wikkit Harvard College Observatory director Harlow Shapley sent Payne’s thesis to Princeton’s heavyweight astronomer, Henry Norris Russell, who dismissed her result as “clearly impossible.” Payne dutifully inserted a statement in her thesis that the calculated abundances of hydrogen and helium were “almost certainly not real.”
Within a few years, Russell realized Payne’s calculations were on the mark when his analysis of the data took a different route to the same conclusion. Russell promptly took credit, publishing his finding with barely a nod to Payne. (Princeton for years credited him as the sole discoverer.)
@Cayucosine @wikkit Maybe "dissertation" is the technically correct term according to some authority, I'm not sure, but in practice both are often used interchangeably.
And honestly, I doubt that raising that question will help anyone understand the original toot better.
"she transferred to St. Paul's Girls' School, where her music teacher, Gustav Holst, encouraged her to pursue a career in music. "
That's a neat connection!
I will now think of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin when I listen to Holst's "The Planets"
I can just imagine the stable genius explaining the sun:
“Well. The sun, you know. It’s very hot. And big. Some people say it’s bigger than our planet, but I’m not sure. Have you looked at it? It’s so small. Anyway, it’s very hot. And great for getting a tan. Have you seen my tan? It’s great. Everyone should have a tan. But not brown people. I mean, their skin is really brown and that’s very dangerous.But my tan… that’s how a tan should look.”
D. Trump
All very strange as Helium was first identified in the spectrum of the Sun in 1868.
Given it was found there then why did no one join the dots and wonder if the Sun could be made of it also? 😕
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