The Mystery of The Stars:

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Astronomer

By Marissa Moss

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Cecilia deserves to be as famous as Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, and Galileo. She added to our understanding of the stars in a way nobody had before her.

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Moss (the Talia’s Codebook series) crafts an astute biography of astronomer Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900–1979) that showcases her accomplishments in a male-dominated industry. Raised by a single mother who could only afford university for Payne-Gaposchkin’s brother, the bookish teen won a full scholarship to Cambridge at 17. A lecture by astronomer Arthur Eddington gave her “a giddy sense of learning something new and transformative,” prompting her to switch her studies to physics and work with Eddington on understanding the structure of stars. Despite finishing classes in 1922, Cambridge denied her a degree because she was a woman, a policy that remained until 1948. A research fellowship took her to Harvard, where she discovered that hydrogen and helium are the primary elements in stars, demonstrating that the celestial bodies are essentially “giant balls of gas”—a finding that overturned centuries of scientific assumptions. Though her work was often overshadowed or usurped by colleagues—her conclusions were initially dismissed as too radical, and a male astronomer later received credit for publishing similar findings—she refused to be pushed out of her beloved field. Comics panel chapter openings feature winsome depictions of Payne-Gaposchkin, adding levity and visual energy to the somewhat dense narrative. It amounts to a celebratory account of hard-won achievements.

— Publishers Weekly