As you may know, I’m not at all happy with how things are politically right now. You can pick from a thousand different horrific events, though I tend to focus in on the attacks on science. That includes RFK Jr.’s attempts to Make America Sick Again, severe funding cuts to agencies, and policies put in place to step on science and scientists’ ability to speak about reality.

I am also not afraid to make my voice heard. That’s why I’m glad there’s another nationwide No Kings rally on Saturday, March 28. I’ll be at my local one in Charlottesville, Virginia, waving my big American flag and letting people know we need real change.

There are over 3,000 such events planned for the day, so if you’re up for it and in the US I’m sure there’s one near you. This is more than the last rally where seven million people showed up, so I’m hoping we see an even bigger jump in attendance for this one. This could be the biggest single protest in US history, and I like the sound of that.

I hope y’all can attend. Things keep getting worse, but they don’t have to be. The louder we are the more progress we’ll make, and we need to make noise right up and through the mid-terms this winter. Oh: If you can’t attend for whatever reason, the good folks at Stand Up For Science are having an accessible rally you can attend online! That’s a great idea; being inclusive always is.

My colleague Jason Wright recently posted on Bluesky that he was reading the autobiography of the astronomer Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin, and really enjoyed it. That prompted me to look it up, and I found it on the Internet Archive. I’m reading it now, and it’s delightful.

CPG was a fantastically remarkable person. You can read about her history in, for example, Wikipedia, though that does tend to flatten the nature of her accomplishments. The key issue here is that she was the first person to understand that the stars, including the sun, were made mostly of hydrogen and helium. It’s difficult to overstate how important this was in astronomy! It was thought at the time that the stars were made of the same stuff as Earth and the other planets. While those heavier elements are also in stars — and in roughly the same proportions as they are on our planet — they are dwarfed by the amount of hydrogen and helium, so much so that we say the universe itself is composed of H, He, and a dash of assorted other elements. 

And oh, did I mention that she did this for her PhD thesis when she was 25 years old? No? Holy wow. 

I’ll note her conclusion was at first dismissed by astronomers, including the famous Henry Norris Russell (of the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, itself a revolution in astronomy). He urged her to downplay that result in her PhD thesis, and she did, saying her results that hydrogen was so abundant was “almost certainly not real.” 

Then, a few years later, Russell himself realized (via different means) that her results were in fact true, and briefly acknowledged she figured it out first. We now know she not only figured it out first but got the numbers remarkably accurately.

She literally discovered what the universe is made of.

And she did this before we understood how stars worked, before quantum mechanics, and only just as we started to understand what the spectra of stars meant. She figured out all this while still in the dark, so to speak, about a lot of work later done in this field that would clarify the science. Phenomenal.

As I was reading her autobiography I started thinking about her as a person. I have some knowledge of astronomical history, as any astronomer does, but the exact dates of all these discoveries are a bit of a blur to me. I was a bit surprised to learn she was born in 1900… but then was shocked when I saw she died in 1979.

My first thought after reading that leapt unbidden into my head: Cecelia Payne-Gaposchkin, the woman who first figured out what stars are made of, might have seen Star Wars.

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