WHAT THE STARS ARE MADE OF: CECILIA PAYNE AND THE COMPOSITION OF THE UNIVERSE

A young woman finished a doctoral thesis in 1925 and answered the oldest question anyone has ever asked about the sky: what are the stars made of? Her answer was hydrogen. Overwhelmingly, almost comically, hydrogen, with a generous helping of helium and a rounding error of everything else, ourselves included. She was right. She was also told, by the most respected astronomer in America, that this could not possibly be so, and she duly wrote in her own thesis that her own correct result was almost certainly not real.Four years later he published the same conclusion, and for the next half century most people gave him the credit.What the Stars Are Made Of follows Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin from a lecture hall where she was required to sit in the front row alone, because women were not permitted to share a row with men, to the day in 1956 when Harvard finally admitted that the person who had been doing a professor's work for thirty years might as well be called one. Along the way there is a Bengali physicist whose equation nobody in Boston had read carefully, half a million photographs of the sky in glass-plate boxes, a marriage arranged partly by visa, three million observations of stars that could not make up their minds how bright to be, and a great deal of quiet stubbornness.It is also a book about what stars actually are and why they burn, told without a single equation. Boris Kriger and Anna Kriger explain how a ribbon of colored light can be interrogated until it confesses the temperature of something ninety-three million miles away, why the simplest atom in existence runs the entire universe, and how the calcium in your bones was assembled in a furnace that no longer exists.The two stories are one story. The assumption that hid hydrogen for four years and the assumption that hid Cecilia Payne for forty came out of the same mental habit: knowing the answer in advance and looking for data polite enough to agree.You are made of the leftovers.