How three remarkable women of whom you have never heard produced our modern classification of the stars
Edward Charles Pickering (1846-1919) was an American astrophysicist who worked to capture the spectra of multiple stars simultaneously, supported by the so-called Harvard Computers or “Pickering’s Harem”, a team of women researchers under Pickering’s mentorship, to catalog the spectra.
This team included Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941), who developed the stellar classification system, and Henrietta Swan Leavitt (1868-1921), who discovered the means to measure the distance from a star to the earth by its spectra, later used to identify other galaxies in the universe.
Later, this team included Cecilia Payne (1900-1979), who developed a good friendship with Cannon; Payne’s thesis based on her work with Cannon was able to determine the composition and temperature of the stars, collaborating with Cannon’s classification system.
The work of these three remarkable women was highlighted in the most recent episode (number 8) in the brilliant television series “Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey“.