Who and what has she do to with me? Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin (1900 – 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 elemental differences between the Sun and Earth. Independent observations eventually proved she was correct. Her work on the nature of variable stars, carried out with her husband, Sergei Gaposchkin, were foundational to modern astrophysics. [source: Wikipedia ] I hadn't heard of her, I have watched a LOT of astronomy and physicist videos on YouTube, I have read a lot of books about these spheres of human endeavour and yet ... nothing. It's all men, men, men ... white men ... which it turns out, time and relative time again, is absolute bollocks, and a lie still being told by white men. As