10 women who changed astronomy

Women have long contributed meaningful scientific discoveries to the field of astronomy; however, men have primarily dominated the vocation. As of 2019, women earn about 40 percent of the Ph.D.s granted in the field of astronomy, but that has not always been the case.

And there are many cases of women working in astronomy only to have their findings overshadowed or derided in some capacity. Until relatively recently, women typically had to be related or married to a prominent astronomer, take on remedial roles, do research in secret, or even forgo access to a public bathroom, all in the pursuit of knowledge of the stars.

To highlight their accomplishments despite the challenges they faced, I have researched and devised a list of women that I found to be incredibly influential to the field of astronomy. This is by no means an exhaustive account — not even close. But the biographies here are a celebration of some of the most profound developments made by women as well as discoveries that changed our understanding of the universe.

Caroline Herschel

1750–1848

One of the first women to be a professional astronomer, Caroline Herschel discovered eight comets, 500 stars, and 2,500 nebulae in her long life.

Moving from her home in Hanover, Germany, to England in her early 20s, Herschel and her brother William pursued a career in music. Soon, however, William’s interests turned to astronomy. He was propelled into the spotlight when he discovered Uranus in 1781, bringing along his sister as his assistant. Her work began with polishing telescope lenses and making calculations.

Eventually, William began working for the royal family and, with that, Herschel became the first paid female scientist in Britain. Her pursuits morphed into finding comets and nebulae as well as editing the work of former Astronomer Royal John Flamsteed. This included reviewing and correcting the information on some of his discoveries while adding 500 more of her own to an index.

After her brother’s death in 1822, Herschel moved back to Germany and continued to help his son, John, pursue astronomical knowledge. She also worked on her collection of thousands of nebulae, for which she received a gold medal from the Royal Astronomical Society in 1828. She later received an honorary membership to the same society for her work, along with her contemporary and friend, Mary Somerville.

Maria Mitchell

1818–1889

Maria Mitchell not only became the first female astronomy professor in the U.S., but she was also the first person in America to discover a comet.

Mitchell, who was born in Nantucket, Massachusetts, was highly influenced by her parents, who believed in equal education for both sexes. Her father was an educator and amateur astronomer, and encouraged Mitchell to operate his observatory together at night, while she worked during the day as a librarian.

On Oct. 1, 1847, at the age of 29, she discovered the comet that would propel her to prominence. Known as Miss Mitchell’s Comet, C/1847 T1 was a non-periodic comet. Others spotted it in the following days, but the immediacy with which Mitchell reported it to astronomical officials meant the comet bore her name.

She went on to become first woman elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1848. She was also one of the first women elected to the American Philosophical Society and was selected as a fellow at the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She worked for what is now known as the U.S. Naval Observatory, calculating the positions of Venus. Mitchell became one of the first professors appointed at the newly established Vassar College, remaining there until retiring in 1889. During her life, she was a proponent of women in the sciences and heavily involved in political movements at the time, including the women’s suffrage movement and the abolition of slavery.

Annie Jump Cannon

1863–1941

Annie Jump Cannon is known for classifying 350,000 stars and developing the Harvard system of spectral classification, which is still in use to this day.

Born in Delaware, Cannon was introduced to stargazing by her mother. She studied physics and astronomy at Wellesley College in Massachusetts. After graduating, she became focused on photography. But after the death of her mother in 1894, she dove back into the world of astronomy.

Cannon enrolled as a special student at Radcliffe College (the women’s college affiliated with the then all-male Harvard College), where she began work as part of a group known as “Pickering’s women.” These women were designated to conduct research and calculations under Harvard Observatory Director Edward Pickering, and were often referred to as “computers.” Following in the footsteps of insightful contemporaries such as Williamina Fleming and Antonia Maury, Cannon began examining image plates of various stars. Her analysis of over 1,100 stars led her to refine a method of classification based on their colors (which are related to their temperatures). The mnemonic device “Oh! Be A Fine Girl — Kiss Me!” is now a well-known way to remember the OBAFGKM classes of the Harvard spectral classification. The work was eventually published in the Henry Draper Catalogue of classification and officially adopted by the International Astronomical Union in 1922.
The extensive work bolstered her career, earning Cannon the position of curator of observational photographs at Harvard, which led to many more discoveries of variable stars and novae. She also received a Ph.D. from Groningen University in the Netherlands — the first woman to do so — as well as an honorary doctorate from Oxford University, among many more achievements.

Today, her legacy lives on: In 1933, the American Astronomical Society established the Annie Jump Cannon Award for outstanding current and future potential research by a female postdoctoral researcher. It is given to a North American female astronomer within five years of receiving her Ph.D. Among the winners are scientists who have advanced our understanding of the life cycle of stars, gravitational lensing, and more.

Henrietta Swan Leavitt

1868–1921

A relative unknown at her time of death, Henrietta Swan Leavitt was instrumental in the discovery of a relationship between the brightness and the period of Cepheid variables, a class of variable star that allows astronomers to determine distance in the universe.

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Leavitt attended Oberlin College before transferring to Radcliffe College, where she studied languages, arts, and astronomy. There she took a route similar to Cannon’s and began work for Pickering. Despite being highly educated, she worked as a volunteer in the position starting in 1895, before eventually becoming a paid employee in 1903. She was also not allowed to operate the telescope, which was exclusively reserved for men.

Part of her job was comparing variable stars. During her research, she noticed that the period over which a Cepheid variable star changed brightness directly related to the brightness of that star. (A brighter star has a longer period than a fainter star.) This became known as the period-luminosity relationship. It was later used by Edwin Hubble to conclude that Andromeda (M31) was in fact a faraway galaxy and not a nebula within the Milky Way. Unfortunately, Leavitt’s position did not allow her to fully invest her time in these stars, and she eventually moved on to other tasks.

Leavitt died of cancer at 53, after experiencing many health problems throughout her life. Years later, researchers fully grasped the weight of her work and wanted to nominate her for a Nobel Prize. Unfortunately, this honor cannot be awarded posthumously.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin

1900–1979

The first recipient of the Annie Jump Cannon Award, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin was also the first person to discover that stars are primarily made up of hydrogen and helium — a finding that took years to be acknowledged by the scientific community.

Born in Wendover, England, Payne-Gaposchkin was an active student. She attended Cambridge University with an interest in science but was unsure of what to focus on. There, she met astronomer Arthur Eddington, who — after she bombarded him with an onslaught of questions — gave her access to professional astronomical journals. Thus, her career in astronomy began.

Payne-Gaposchkin pursued her advanced degree at Harvard under the guidance of Harlow Shapely, Edward Pickering’s successor. Like Cannon and Leavitt, she looked at the spectra of stars, but also took up the study of quantum physics. During these studies, she ultimately confirmed the idea that varying star colors are due to the stars’ temperatures. She also showed that differences in stellar spectra are not due to disparate chemical composition in stars — which was the accepted theory at the time — but due instead to differing temperatures. Thus, stars are all mostly made of the same elements: hydrogen and helium.

n 1925, her doctoral dissertation asserted these findings, which were soon deemed “clearly impossible” by Princeton University Professor Henry Norris Russell. She was forced to downplay her work. Only later did others come to the same conclusion, and astronomers Otto Struve and Velta Zebergs said hers was “the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”

Despite this hitch in her early career, Payne-Gaposchkin continued to work as Shapley’s assistant, teaching for some time before being officially appointed as a professor in 1956. The same year, she was designated chair of the Harvard astronomy department.

Nancy Grace Roman

1925–2018

Nicknamed the “Mother of Hubble,” Nancy Grace Roman spent years pushing for the use of the newest technology to better understand the universe.

Roman was born in Nashville, Tennessee. She was always interested in looking up at the stars and spearheaded an astronomy club in seventh grade. Despite being dissuaded from the subject during high school, she earned her bachelor’s degree in astronomy from Swarthmore College and her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.

After working at the latter for six years, she found that tenure was nearly impossible for women and made her way to NASA in 1959, just a few months after the agency’s establishment. In 1961, she became the first chief of astronomy. At that time, balloons, sounding rockets, and airplanes were used for high-elevation observations — but Roman wanted an observatory that would live in space indefinitely. She had her heart set on creating a space telescope.

For years, Roman rallied for funding for this technological feat with Congress, conferring about science objectives before the scope was approved in 1977. She temporarily worked as a consultant while taking time off to care for her mother in 1979, before coming back to work at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center’s Astronomical Data Center. Although she was no longer associated with the development of the Hubble Space Telescope on a day to day basis, she was never far from it, keeping up to date on its progress until its launch in 1990. She retired from NASA officially in 1997 and became a schoolteacher in Washington, D.C.

After her death, NASA announced their next flagship scope would be the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. When it is launched in May 2027, the infrared telescope will explore dark energy, exoplanets, and more.

Vera Rubin

1928–2016

Vera Rubin is best known for her discovery of dark matter — the strange substance that makes up roughly 85 percent of the known universe.
Rubin was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and was science-minded from the beginning. She received a scholarship to attend Vassar College and then went on to earn her master’s degree in astrophysics at Cornell University. She attended Georgetown University for her Ph.D., where she eventually taught astronomy courses.

Her research went into high gear after she received a posting at the Carnegie Institution. The institution was working on extremely high-powered spectrographs to study ever-farther and tinier galaxies. In the 1970s, she and her colleague, Kent Ford, discovered that the stars within a galaxy are all moving at the same speed, regardless of their location in the core or outer edges. She concluded that this was impossible — unless there was something gravitationally binding the farther-out stars to the galaxy. They concluded it had to be some kind of unseen, “dark” matter, providing compelling evidence for the theoretical dark matter suggested by astronomer Fritz Zwicky some 30 years prior. But despite the fact that the two had observed over 60 galaxies to reach this conclusion, for some time the scientific community remained skeptical.

The challenge of dark matter, even to this day, is that it cannot be seen, yet we now know it makes up much of the universe. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Cerro Pachón, Chile, hopes to change that. Seeing first light in 2025, this observatory will include the largest digital camera ever built and the ability to study the southern sky in unprecedented detail by using gravitational lensing to identify dark matter.

In 1981, Rubin was elected to the National Academy of Sciences, and she received the National Medal of Science in 1993 along with other awards. Despite the recognition, for Rubin, that was never her goal. Throughout her life she simply enjoyed the search for strange and unexplainable phenomena within the universe.

Carolyn Shoemaker

1929–2021

Carolyn Shoemaker identified many asteroids and comets, including the famous Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9. But her path to achieving this was not a linear one.

Shoemaker was born in Gallup, New Mexico, and grew up in Chico, California, where she attended college for political science, literature, and history. However, after meeting the man who would eventually become her husband, her interest in science grew. After Gene Shoemaker received his doctorate at Princeton University, they moved and raised their three children in Flagstaff, Arizona.

As her kids got older, Carolyn continued her pursuit of knowledge first with geology and later astronomy, working as a research assistant to her husband on the Palomar Asteroid and Comet Survey at the Palomar Observatory in San Diego. In the search for new asteroids, she would examine the images under a stereo microscope. One day in 1993, while working with her husband and amateur astronomer David Levy, she discovered a streak near Jupiter in an image of the planet. It was unlike anything they had witnessed before. It turned out to be a comet that had come too close to Jupiter, breaking up into several fragments and now orbiting the planet. In honor of its discoverers, the comet became Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9. Eventually, the comet fragments plunged into Jupiter’s atmosphere, the first event of this kind ever observed.

Carolyn discovered 39 comets in total, the highest at the time. She received many accolades for her work, including an honorary doctorate of science from Northern Arizona University. The asteroid 4446 Carolyn was named in her honor.

Jocelyn Bell Burnell

Born 1943

The first person to notice signals coming from rapidly spinning neutron stars, Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars in the 1960s, which has had far-reaching implications for radio astronomy to this day.

Born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Bell Burnell quickly became a voracious reader, including in the sciences, despite her school’s ban on science classes for girls. She attended the University of Glasgow before getting her Ph.D. in physics at the University of Cambridge.

During her time at Cambridge, she helped build the Interplanetary Scintillation Array, a radio telescope that assisted in her study of quasars (extremely luminous centers of galaxies, which house feeding supermassive black holes). One day, she noticed strange radio signals in her data. She and her superior thought it might be an issue with the telescope, as the signals weren’t always apparent and unlike anything they had seen before. But it was not an equipment malfunction, and they determined the pulses were coming from neutron stars, now known as pulsars.

Although this revelation was enough to be acknowledged by the Nobel Prize committee, she did not receive the prize because she was a graduate student at the time. Instead, it went to her advisor, Antony Hewish, and astronomer Martin Ryle.

Bell Burnell, however, was undeterred. She went on to win several awards throughout her career, including the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics in 2018 for her discovery of pulsars. She used the $3 million prize to start the Bell Burnell Scholarship Fund to promote greater diversity within the field of physics. She also continued working at many universities across the U.K. for several years. Now she gives speeches encouraging women to never give up.

Andrea M. Ghez

Born 1965

Andrea Ghez received the Nobel Prize in physics in 2020 for her study of the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy. She is one of only five women to ever receive this award.

Born in New York City, Ghez saw the first lunar landing on television and decided to become an astronaut. Although her plans did change, she kept astronomy in mind as she went on to study physics at MIT before receiving her PhD from Caltech. After graduating, she came to work at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she is a professor of physics and astronomy.

While at UCLA, Ghez and her colleagues began using the W.M. Keck Observatory telescope and adaptive optics to observe the center of the Milky Way at infrared wavelengths. This allowed them to cut through dust-obscured areas, targeting a group of stars in the constellation Sagittarius. They found stars moving at high speeds around a single, compact point. This point is Sagittarius A*, the Milky Way’s central supermassive black hole and the closest such object to Earth.

For their breakthrough, she and Reinhard Genzel, a professor at University of California, Berkeley, were jointly awarded half the 2020 Nobel Prize, while the other half went to Roger Penrose, a professor at University of Oxford, for separate work on black holes. Ghez has also won numerous other awards and continues to discuss her work in talks and documentaries.

Ghez sums up the impact winning that prize in her UCLA bio: “To me, it’s always been very important to encourage young women into the sciences, so to me the Nobel Prize means an opportunity and a responsibility to encourage the next generation of scientists who are passionate about this kind of work into the field.”