On September 3, 1938, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin submitted what would become the fourth in a series of papers on variable stars — the work she and her husband Sergei Gaposchkin were producing at a pace that was reshaping stellar astronomy. Her name appeared second on the papers. She had done the bulk of the analysis.

Payne was born in 1900 in Wendover, England, and studied natural sciences at Cambridge, but like Joan Clarke, received only a titular degree — Cambridge did not award women full degrees until 1948. She emigrated to the United States in 1923 and enrolled at Radcliffe College, the women's affiliate of Harvard, where she completed what has been called the most brilliant PhD thesis in astronomy.

That thesis, completed in 1925, demonstrated that stars are composed primarily of hydrogen and helium — a finding that established the basic chemical composition of the universe. Her dissertation advisor, Henry Norris Russell, told her the conclusion was "almost certainly not right" and persuaded her to disavow it in the published version. Four years later, Russell independently arrived at the same conclusion and published it as his own finding. He credited Payne in a footnote.

She remained at Harvard for the entirety of her career, initially paid as a "technical assistant" rather than a faculty member, teaching courses that did not appear in the Harvard catalog because she was not officially a professor. In 1956, Harvard appointed her to full professor and made her chair of the astronomy department — the first woman to hold either position. She had been doing the work for thirty years.

She died in 1979. Her 1925 thesis is now considered one of the foundational documents of modern astrophysics.