BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy Women in Astronomy & Space

It's International Women's Day on March 8th. I'll be celebrating some of the contributions women have made to astronomy and space.

Let's start today with Valentina Tereshkova whose 82nd birthday is today.

Tereshkova spent three days orbiting the Earth strapped into a space capsule so primitive that it wasn't safe to land in it. So how did the cosmonaut get home? That's part of the story of the first woman in space, on a solo flight twenty years before NASA sent Sally Ride into orbit on a Space Shuttle.

Valentina Tereshkova - the First Spacewoman

Another March birthday is the amazing Caroline Herschel, born on March 16, 1750 who lived into the middle of the 19th century. As a child, she had only a few years of schooling in a school where girls weren't taught arithmetic. But as an adult she became a well-known astronomer in partnership with her brother William. When she died in Hannover (now part of Germany) the royal family sent their horses to join the funeral cortege as a mark of respect.

Caroline Herschel was an intelligent young woman trapped in domestic servitude by her mother. Her brother William rescued her and trained her as a singer. After he discovered the planet Uranus, the two of them ended up forming a great partnership whose work revolutionized the study of astronomy.

Caroline Herschel

Annie Jump Cannon

Oh! Be a fine girl (guy)--kiss me! This is the traditional mnemonic for the way stars are classified: OBAFGKM. Cannon was the astronomer and suffragist who devised the classification system and who said that astronomical spectroscopy made it "almost as if the distant stars had acquired speech." She classified about a quarter of a million star spectra for the Henry Draper catalog.

Annie Cannon - photograph

Wow this is a wonderful idea! Thanks for sharing!

Thank you for your kind comment, Jodirose. There are more fantastic women to come.

Achievements may be honored with prizes and medals, but few get represented as children's toys. However Lego responded to a proposal to showcase women in space and astronomy by making a Lego set representing four such women and their major contributions. Who were these women?

NASA Women in Lego

I hope children get ideas about what women can do. The Lego figures show four brilliant pioneering women. Margaret Hamilton was the computer scientist & systems engineer who created the mission software for the Apollo program. Astronomer Nancy Grace Roman, aka The Mother of Hubble, was the first woman executive at NASA. Astrophysicist Sally Ride, who had degrees in physics and English from Stanford University, was the first American woman in space. Mae Jemison was a medical doctor with a degree in chemical engineering from Stanford who had also met degree requirements in African and Afro-American studies - she was the first African American woman astronaut.

In the 19th to early 20th centuries Harvard Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts hired a number of smart women as computers. The women worked hard for their meager wages - they were paid much less than men. And the director wanted data processed, not theoretical work. Yet some of the computers did more than computation, such as Annie Cannon. One of the least known, but considered by some professional astronomers to be the most able, was Antonia Maury.

Antonia Maury

Maury crater on the Moon honors both Antonia Maury and her cousin Lieutenant Matthew Fontaine Maury of the U. S. Naval Observatory. (The labels with the name Maury plus a letter of the alphabet are satellite features of the main crater.)

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

How does the composition of a star affect the temperature? This may not sound like a big deal to non-astronomers. But, in fact, In 1925 a young woman solved this puzzle in her doctoral thesis, and her analysis was a major breakthrough in astrophysics. The distinguished astronomer Otto Struve described it as “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”

Cecilia Payne came to the conclusion that the most abundant element in the Universe was hydrogen, but was advised to downplay this since it was "clearly impossible". No one doubts it now.


English-American astronomer and astrophysicist

Henrietta Swan Leavitt

Henrietta Leavitt isn't a well known name, but a century ago she made one of the most important discoveries of 20th century astronomy. Previously, astronomers could only measure distances up to 100 light years, but her work extended that to 10 million light years.

I hoped to learn more about Henrietta Leavitt, but her biographer wasn't able to give much help. In the book Miss Leavitt's Stars, he found that her life left almost no footprints on history. The slim volume contrasts the solidity of her professional accomplishment with the butterfly touch of her life. Miss Leavitt isn't even the star of her own biography.

Maria Mitchell was a true pioneer woman. She didn't brave a physical wilderness. Hers was the harder job of pioneering higher education for women. She was the first American woman to discover a comet, the first to be elected to scientific societies and the first woman professor of astronomy.

Maria Mitchell - in Her Own Words is a pot pourri of her meetings with the great and good of the nineteenth century, her own life, and her ideas and work. The material was collected after Maria's death by her sister Phebe from journals and letters.

Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals is available as a free ebook from Project Gutenburg.

Mary Somerville and the World of Science - book

Mary Somerville was an exceptional individual. Although self-educated and - as a woman - barred from membership in scientific societies, her books sold well and were used as textbooks for many decades. Allan Chapman relates her achievements to the context of 19th century science in Britain.

Mary Somerville was the first scientist!

Williamina Fleming

Through the vision and dedication of Edward Pickering, Harvard College had one of the world's top observatories. Pickering had a secret weapon: a team of women computers. One of them was Mina Fleming who began her employment as a housekeeper and ended it as an astronomer of international repute.

Portrait of Williamina Fleming

Four outstanding women astronomers were honored by a Google Doodle in recent years. None of the Doodles have had a worldwide reach, but there is a link to each delightful drawing and I've given some biographical details. Read on to meet this stellar quartet.

Doodles for Women Astronomers

Three of the women - Caroline Herschel, Maria Mitchell and Annie Cannon - have already been introduced in this thread. But do read about the brilliant Beatrice Tinsley whose pioneering work laid the foundations for our modern understanding of galactic evolution. She packed an incredible amount of superb work into her short life. She was only forty when she died.