A key feature of our understanding of cosmology is that the universe has a finite age. This means that there was a period of the universe’s history when galaxies first formed. Studying this epoch has long been one of the tantalising goals of observational astronomy – it is a goal that is about to become
Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin (10 May 1900 – 7 December 1979) was a British-born American astronomer and astrophysicist who proposed in her 1925 doctoral thesis that stars were composed primarily of hydrogen and helium. Her groundbreaking conclusion was initially rejected because it contradicted the scientific wisdom of the time, which held that there were no significant
Henrietta Swan Leavitt (4 July 1868 – 12 December 1921) was an American astronomer. A graduate of Radcliffe College, she worked at the Harvard College Observatory as a “computer”, tasked with examining photographic plates in order to measure and catalog the brightness of stars. This work led her to discover the relation between the luminosity
Annie Jump Cannon (11 December 1863 – 13 April 1941) was an American astronomer whose cataloging work was instrumental in the development of contemporary stellar classification. With Edward C. Pickering, she is credited with the creation of the Harvard Classification Scheme, which was the first serious attempt to organise and classify stars based on their temperatures and spectral types.
Physics Futures 