Payne's 1925 calculation was right, but the familiar story misses why it looked wrong and how Russell's independent 1929 analysis both confirmed and explicitly credited her earlier result.
In 1925, 24-year-old graduate student Cecilia Payne calculated that the Sun and other stars were composed overwhelmingly of hydrogen and helium—a result so contrary to accepted astronomy that senior astronomer Henry Norris Russell called it “clearly impossible,” leading her to write in her thesis that the enormous abundances she had derived were “almost certainly not real.” Four years later, Russell reached the same conclusion by another method and acknowledged that Payne had got there first.
The Long View