For a long time, many scientists were wrong about what the sun is made-up of until a 25-year-old student wrote an extraordinary doctor’s thesis proving that sun and other stars are made mainly of helium and hydrogen. More info: www-history.mcs.st-and.ac.uk The student who made this

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings In October of 1883, a paper in the nation’s capital reported under the heading “Current Gossip” that “an Iowa woman has spent seven years embroidering the solar system on a quilt” — a news item originally printed in Iowa and syndicated widely in

Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings The English-American astronomer and astrophysicist Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (May 10, 1900–December 7, 1979) — the first person to earn a Ph.D. in astronomy at Radcliffe-Harvard and the first woman to chair a Harvard department — overcame tremendous