S1 • E10 May 6, 2020 9m
Williamina Fleming (1857-1911) emigrated to Boston from Scotland in 1878 at age 21. Abandoned by her husband soon after they arrived in the United States, Fleming supported herself as a single mother by doing domestic work in the residence of the Harvard College Observatory. Director Edward Pickering, impressed by her intellect, soon employed her as a 'human computer' to calculate and classify the brightness and position of stars. In 1899, Fleming was appointed the Observatory's Curator of Astronomical Photographs, making her the first woman ever to hold a title at Harvard University. In this role, she supervised a team of a dozen other women computers, and advocated for their equal pay. In the course of her career, Fleming discovered 10 novae, over 300 variable stars, and 59 gaseous nebulae, including the iconic Horsehead Nebula in the constellation Orion. She also identified hot Earth-sized stars, later named white dwarfs. One of her most enduring contributions to astronomy was the classification of over 10,000 stars based on their spectra, and the creation of a new astronomical classification system along with Pickering, the Pickering-Fleming System, which supplanted earlier models. Interviewees: science writer Dava Sobel, author of The Glass Universe: How the Ladies of the Harvard Observatory Took the Measure of the Stars; astronomer Wendy Freedman, Professor in Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago, best known for her measurement of the Hubble constant.
