The Stolen Credit For What Makes Up the Sun

StartsWithABang writes: Sure, it's easy today to look at the Sun and know it's a ball of (mostly) hydrogen, generating energy by combining those protons in a chain into helium through the process of nuclear fusion. But before we even knew that nuclear fusion was possible, we needed to figure out what the Sun was made out of, a more difficult task than you'd imagine. The credit was given to Henry Norris Russell (of Hertzsprung-Russell diagram fame), but he completely stole the work from a woman you never heard of: his student, Cecilia Payne, after discouraging her from publishing her work on the subject four years prior.

Comments

Helium

[itzly]

The article missed the opportunity to mention that the spectral line for helium was unknown at the time, and was first discovered in the sun. Hence the name was adopted from Helios, the Greek god of the sun.

Young Marsden Aaaward

[VAXcat]

HA! This reminds me of my days at Rice University, in the early 70s. The Post grad students there each year would award one of their number the "Young Marsden" award. It was presented to the student whose work had been most egregiously ripped off by a faculty member that year. It was called the Young Marsden award, in memory of Marsden, since Rutherford and Geiger got credit for his work on alpha particle scattering