par Houda Haidar
“The male is by nature superior and the female is inferior”,
States Aristotle, building between the female and the thought, a barrier.
Here I am, dusting off all the ancient books of history,
Wondering… Why is the female in astronomy such a mystery?
Did the Moon really obey Aglaonice The Sorceress?
Or was believing in her lunar science(1) too hard to confess?
Even after a lifetime spent observing and drawing moon charts,
Elizabeth Koopmann, The Widow of Hevelius, was still refused credit for her arts.
Maria Cunitz corrected and simplified the equations of Kepler.
Publishing Urania Propitia, though no one encouraged her.
Take inspiration from these fierce scientists, ever exemplary,
stopping for no-one on their path of scientific discovery.
Whilst in Harvard, Pickering(2) constructed his Hareem,
An assembly of ladies mapping the Universe, and yet were not highly esteemed.
Like Williamina Fleming which, among her many great contributions,
Discovered the Horsehead Nebula in the Orion Constellation,
And Henrietta Leavitt who showed us how to climb the cosmic distance ladder
(3) But died not knowing her discoveries on Cepheid (4) variables greatly matter.
Thanks to Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, despite being denied her right to a doctorate, We now know that hydrogen and helium in stars are, without a doubt, preponderant.
Most work of extraordinary female scientists is scraped off the books,
Hidden under the names of other men, wherever you look.
Even after Edward Maunder acknowledged that the work is mainly his wife’s,
Annie’s book The Heavens and their stories (5)still has Edward’s name in the archives.
Dare not feel sadness in their stories, but instead pure empowerment
For these women fought with every fiber in their body for their achievements.
Learn from the likes of Margaret Burbidge how to be regnant,
An admirable person who discovered stellar nucleosynthesis (6) while pregnant.
Be more like Vera Rubin and dare to open a new scientific chapter.
She revolutionised astronomy by showing that galaxies are mostly dark matter.(7)
Strive for excellence, as did Jocelyn Bell Burnell,
whose discovery of radio pulsars others tried to quell.
Women who deserved better than their clandestine revelations.
The world none the wiser on the major progression of their nations.
1 glaonice of Thessaly was a Greek astronomer around the second century BC. She understood mechanisms of lunar eclipses and was able to predict them.
2 The American astronomer Edward Charles Pickering, director of Harvard College Observatory from 1877 to 1919, built the Harvard Computers, or less elegantly named, the Pickering’s Harem. It was a team of women working on the identification, characterisation and classification of stars, as well as the creation of a sky map of the two hemispheres.
3 The cosmic distance ladder consists of using indirect methods which enable us to determine the distances to celestial objects with respect to the Earth. Some of them are based on astronomical objects that have a known luminosity and are used as physical distance indicators.
4 A Cepheid is a type of star, discovered in 1908, that pulsates radially, varying in both diameter and temperature and also producing changes in brightness with a well-defined stable period and amplitude. Because of their robust characteristics, Cepheids are a good indicator of cosmic benchmarks for scaling galactic and extragalactic distances.
5 Astronomical book written with the hopes to engage and interest people in the study of the Universe through short stories inspired from observable astronomical events and pictures of the sun, the star of our solar system.
6 Nucleosynthesis is a physical process, based on nuclear reactions, that creates the chemical elements. It takes place in the interiors of stars, in supernovae explosions and other astrophysical situations where high-energy collisions can take place between atomic nuclei and elementary particles.
7 This matter is completely different from the ordinary matter that we tackle every day which is composed of the chemical elements of the Mendeleiv table. So far, dark matter has been detected only by its gravity and it is thought to be constituted of exotic elementary particles that hardly interact at all with light or with ordinary atoms. In the Universe, about
23% of the total matter and energy is coming from dark matter, and only 2% belongs to our ordinary matter.
Houda Haider is thankful to Margaux Abello for the support in writing this piece, and to Lucie Leboulleux for sharing useful resources with her that made the writing of this piece possible. This poem is primarily based on her research. She is also grateful to Ayushi Parmar for the fruitful suggestions that greatly improved the quality of this work.