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When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.

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In 1925, a British graduate student at Harvard named Cecilia Payne handed in a doctoral thesis that quietly upended astronomy.…