As a new play examines the work of Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, we celebrate the women whose crucial discoveries were ignored or suppressed

Eighty-five years ago, several dozen eminent astronomers posed for a photograph outside the newly constructed McDonald Observatory near Fort Davis in Texas. All were men – with one exception. Half-concealed by a man in front of her, the face of a solitary woman can just be made out in the grainy black and white image.

This is Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, whose impact on our understanding of the cosmos was profound. She showed stars were primarily made of hydrogen and helium, contradicting the scientific orthodoxy of the 1920s, which held that they were made of an array of elements. Her claims were suppressed and her work obscured, like her image on the McDonald Observatory photograph.

“You can see what she was up against from that picture taken in 1939,” said Meg Weston-Smith, a family friend of the Gaposhkins. “Astronomy, like so much else, was a man’s world.”

In the end, the ideas of Payne-Gaposchkin – who was born in Britain and married a Russian scientist, Sergei Gaposchkin – prevailed, though not without considerable opposition from male colleagues, as revealed in a new play, The Lightest Element, by Stella Feehily, opening this week at the Hampstead Theatre. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, partially obscured, centre left, third row, was the only woman in the photo of eminent astronomers at the McDonald Observatory in 1939. Photograph: McDonald Observatory

“Essentially she was up against a men’s club,” says Feehilly. “Astronomers, virtually all of them male, all agreed that the stars and the universe must be made of the same elements as we find on Earth. Being a woman and outside the group, she was free to be more radical in her thinking. She was right and they were wrong. The cosmos is 98% hydrogen and helium.”

Nor was Payne-Gaposchkin alone in being initially disparaged for being a female astronomer and only now being recognised for her brilliance. Annie Maunder and Alice Everett, who in the 19th century were among the first women to earn a living in astronomy, recently had asteroids named after them.

In addition, the biggest camera in the world – to be unveiled in Chile and used to image the entire visible sky every three to four nights beginning next year – has been named the Vera C Rubin Observatory. Rubin, who was American, played a critical role in revealing that our universe appears to be permeated with mysterious, undetectable particles. This is dark matter and it has played a key role in the evolution of the universe.

Like all female students at Cambridge until 1948, Maunder and Everett were not awarded degrees despite passing their examinations with honours; during her education and career, Rubin suffered widespread discrimination. Even after she acquired fame, she was blocked from using the great Palomar Observatory to continue her groundbreaking research because it had no bathrooms for women. Rubin’s “solution” was to tape a piece of paper in the shape of a skirt on top of the men’s symbol on the bathroom door.

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