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Here we celebrate some of the different people who have unbounded the patriarchal gaze and its preconceptions, to reveal what we have not yet understood about the Universe.
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Image: Ota Chou, 'Women Observing the Stars' (hoshi wo miru josei), 1936. Natl. Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. CC BY-1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
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| ‘I was flabbergasted: this could be evidence of our people knowing that Earth is a planet along with the others in our night skies ... a millennia before the likes of Galileo, who discovered this a mere 400 years ago!’ - Australian astronomer and Wiradjuri woman Kirsten Banks. |
Kirsten Banks, ‘I’m following the footsteps of my Aboriginal ancestors, the first astronomers’, The Guardian, 21 March 2018. Image: Kirsten Banks. Courtesy UNSW Sydney and Kirsten Banks. CC BY-SA 4.0.
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Wary of relying on computerised calculations for America’s first crewed orbital space flight in 'Friendship 7', John Glenn told NASA engineers before launch in 1962 to ‘get the girl’ to redo the equations by hand, using her own calculations. Katherine Johnson remembers Glenn saying: ‘If she says they’re good, then I’m ready to go.’ The mission was a success. DH
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Image: Katherine Johnson, with astronaut Leland Melvin. NASA. Public Domain.
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Professor of astrophysics at UNSW Sydney, Lisa Harvey-Smith is also a project scientist for the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), working on the origins and evolution of cosmic magnetism and supernova remnants. As a trans person Lisa says: ‘Being gay in STEM fields can be difficult. In our fractured world, it’s time we listened more and judged less’. DH
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Image: Professor Lisa Harvey-Smith in 2014. Source: Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 4.0.
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Hypatia lived in Alexandria, the ancient capital of knowledge, c.360-415 BCE. A popular teacher, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer, she made astrolabes: instruments used to calculate the position of stars. Unusually for a woman of the time, she advised the city council. Hypatia was murdered by zealots during religious conflicts in the city, but is immortalised as ‘a martyr for philosophy’. DH
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Image: An actress, possibly Mary Anderson, in the title role of the play Hypatia, c. 1900, unknown photographer. Source: Wikimedia. Public Domain.
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| Christine Darden was one of the 'human computers' at NASA's Langley Research Center in the late 1960s, but Darden says she ‘wanted to do more than process the data, she wanted to create it’. Over a 40-year career at NASA, Darden pioneered research on high lift wing design in supersonic flow, sonic boom prediction, and sonic boom minimisation. LH |
Image: Christine Darden. Credit: NASA. Public Domain.
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| Nichelle Nichols is celebrated for her role as one of the first African American women to appear in a major television series, playing Star Trek’s Lt Nyota Uhuru. When ‘number one fan’ Martin Luther King Jr. heard Nichols was considering leaving, he said: ‘You can’t, you’re part of history.’ She went on to inspire a generation of people of colour. DH |
Image: Nichols as Lieutenant Uhura on 'Star Trek', 1967. Source: NASA. Public Domain
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| ‘A bird cannot fly with one wing only. Human spaceflight cannot develop any further without the active participation of women.’ - Valentina Tereshkova |
Image: Tereshkova with American civil rights activist Angela Davis in 1973 Berlin, East Germany. CC BY-SA 3.0.
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LGBTQ scientists have for many years gone unrecognised. But physicist Sally Ride was both the first lesbian and American female in space when she launched with the STS-7 Mission on 18 June 1983, before flying again on the Space Shuttle in 1984. She was also a life-long advocate of women in STEM and gender equality. LH
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Image: Sally Ride on the STS-7 Mission in 1983, monitoring control panels from the pilot's chair on the flight deck. NASA.
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| Herschel made a major contribution to the 'New General Catalogue' of deep sky objects, such as nebulae and star clusters. Known as the NGC, this catalogue is still extensively used, as are her related discoveries of hundreds of stellar nebulae, although these are lesser known than her comet observations. TS |
Image: Detail of Caroline Herschel engraving in ‘Women Worth Emulating’, 1877. Source: Wikimedia. Public Domain.
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| Planetary scientist Carolyn Porco is renowned for her studies of the outer solar system. She led the imaging science team of the Cassini-Huygens space-research mission, which provided high resolution images of Saturn and its moon Titan. She was also on the team for the Voyager and New Horizons missions, and a consultant with Jill Tarter on the movie 'Contact' starring Jodie Foster. DH |
Image: Carolyn Porco on stage during Star Talk Live in 2016. Source: Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 3.0.
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This Mars Rover was named after Sojourner Truth (1797-1883), the African-American abolitionist born into slavery who but who escaped with her infant daughter to freedom in 1826. As Leila McNeill writes, it is notable that the name was suggested by a 12-year-old girl in an essay contest’. LH
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Image: Mars Sojourner Rover Self Portrait at Namib Dune, 2016. CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
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Honorary astronomer Suzanne Débarbat has pursued her entire career at Paris Observatory since 1953. Not only can she claim to have observed more than 40,000 star transits, her vast knowledge of astronomy is bolstered by a commitment to the role of women in its history. She has shared this openly with many, including Toner Stevenson and Lily Hibberd. Here she is demonstrating the star plate machine at Paris Observatory in 2014. LH
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Image: Suzanne Débarbat at Paris Observatory, still from video ‘In the Footsteps of Venus’, Lily Hibberd, 2015.
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| Jessica Mink is an Astronomical Software Developer and Positional Astronomer, who was part of the team that discovered the rings around the planet Uranus. She says: ‘Each of us is an amalgam of identities, which influence each other … being an astronomer adds something to my life in my LGBTIQ, bicycling, and other worlds.’ LH |
Image: Rings of Uranus, from images captured by Voyager 2 on January 21, 1986. Source: NASA. Public Domain.
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| Rachel Padman is a specialist in radio astronomy at Cambridge University who made contributions to understanding stellar evolution. She transitioned in the early years and speaks of how you can be ‘terrified about... whether you are going to find yourself cut off from the human race. I wasn’t. People were just incredibly understanding about it.’ DH |
Image: Sun behind ornate feature at Newnham College, Cambridge. Wikimedia. Public Domain. CC BY-SA 4.0.
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| In 1966, Majel Barrett was cast as commander ‘Number One’ but lost the role when studio heads disagreed that a woman could be in charge. Barrett is famous for her lifelong role as the voice of all starship computers, which inspired the voice interface for Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. She is now considered the ‘First Lady of Star Trek’. DH |
Image: Majel Barrett as 'Number One'. Source: Wikimedia.
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Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin worked with Harvard’s female computers, and was the first person to receive a doctorate in astronomy from Harvard in 1925. Her major discovery that the atmosphere of the sun was chiefly hydrogen went against popular ideas at the time. Payne-Gaposchkin became the first female professor in her faculty and the first female chair of astronomy at Harvard. DH
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Image: Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin at Harvard College Observatory. Source: Wikimedia. Public Domain.
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| Enheduanna was the daughter of a Sumerian king, but was famously revered for her role as 'EN' High Priestess of Inanna and Sin (Moon) c.2300 BCE. She is considered the world’s first known author and first female astronomer. A crater on Mercury is named after her. DH |
Image: Ancient Sumerian bas-relief portrait, c. 2350-2300 BCE depicting Enheduanna (third from right). Collection University of Pennsylvania Museum. Source: Wikimedia. CC BY 4.0.
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British astronomer Jocelyn Bell Burnell discovered pulsars in 1967, while working on her PhD at the University of Cambridge. But it was her PhD advisor, Antony Hewish, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1974 for this discovery, even though Hewish had dismissed Bell Burnell's initial reports of this finding. LH
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Jocelyn Bell, June 1967.
Source: Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 2.0
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| Ritu Karidhal is an aerospace engineer with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). She was Deputy Operations Director of the Mangalyaan Mars Orbiter Mission, which made India the fourth nation to reach Mars. She was also Director of the ‘Chandrayaan 2 Lunar Mission’. Popularly known as the ‘Rocket Woman of India’, Karidhal says :’I still get goose bumps thinking of that day when our Orbiter entered the Martian orbit’. DH |
Image: Ritu Karidhal at ISRO in 2019. Licensed for non-commercial use by GODL-India.
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10th century astronomer and astrolabe maker Maryam Al-Ijliya Al-astrulabi (مريم الأسطرلابي) lived in Aleppo (today’s Syria) and was renowned for developing astrolabes, an ancient astronomical device – a handheld model of the universe. Her name ‘Al-astrulabi’ translates as ‘the astrolabist’ in Arabic. The main-belt asteroid 7060 Al-'Ijliya is named after her. LH
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Image: Mamluk era astrolabe, dated 1282. Turkish and Islamic Arts Museum, Istanbul. Source: Wikipmedia. CC BY-SA 4.0.
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| After working as a veteran pilot for the PLA Air Force, achieving the rank of major, Yang Liu was selected for astronaut training. In 2012, Liu launched on the Shenzhou 9 mission to Tiangong 1, the Chinese space station. Fourty-nine years to the day after Tereshkova’s historical orbital mission, Liu became the first Chinese woman in space. DH |
Image: Yang Liu. Source: Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 3.0.
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Chilean of the Year 2018, Maritza Soto was completing her doctorate while working in the clear dark skies of Atacama Desert when she discovered her first planet – a gas giant. Soto says: 'People make it seem like you have to be either super-nerdy or the complete opposite, like super-fashionable and girly. No, you can be whoever you want.’ DH
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Image: Maritza Soto, 2019. Source: Wikimedia. License: CC0.
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| Vera Rubin was the person who confirmed the existence of dark matter – one of the greatest discoveries about our universe. But she is yet to be recognised with a Nobel Prize. She was also one of the first women given access to a spectrographic telescope in 1965, which enabled her to measure the speed of objects in the Galaxy and thus prove her theory. LH |
Image: Galaxies NGC 4038/4039. Source: NASA/Wikimedia. Public Domain.
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Becky Smethurst is an astrophysicist at the University of Oxford and runs the popular Dr Becky astronomy channel on Youtube. Smethurst says she is ‘a visible academic online, connecting the public with the current big ideas in astrophysics research in an engaging and accessible way’ and is focussed ‘on how we know something, not just what we know’. DH
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Image: Becky Smethurst Twitter profile.
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Kalpana Chawla (1962-1991) relocated from India to the USA when she was 20, becoming an aerospace engineer and working for NASA. Her first historic flight was aboard the Space Shuttle Columbia 'STS-87', but she lost her life on her second flight aboard the ill-fated Columbia 'STS-107' mission, which disintegrated during re-entry. She is considered a national hero in India. DH
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Image: Kalpana Chawlla. Source: Wikiimedia/NASA. Public Domain.
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Helen Sharman, the first British astronaut and the first woman to visit the Mir space station in May 1991: ‘On my last night in space... I realised that being away from Earth reinforced what my Russian friends had told me on the ground – what’s important is personal relationships and what people can do together.’ LH
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Image: Sokol space suit worn by Helen Sharman, at the National Space Centre. Source: Wikipedia. CC BY 2.0.
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Rebecca Oppenheimer is an exoplanetary scientist who studies objects orbiting stars by trying to observe them directly, and is co-discoverer of 'Gliese 229B', the first object smaller than a star ever detected beyond our solar system. She says: ‘Those of us who identify as transgender struggle with the words, and here it becomes more complicated than the science I am used to.’ LH
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Wide Field Infrared Image of Gliese 229b. Source: Wikimedia. Credit: T. Nakajima and S. Kulkarni, S. Durrance and D.Golimowski (JHU), NASA. Public Domain.
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‘It's made to believe, Women are the same as Men; Are you not convinced, Daughters can also be heroic?’ - Zhenyi Wang
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Image: Wang Zhenyi crater (23.7 km, 13.2°/217.7), Venus. Source: NASA. Public Domain.
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