Background

Ethnicity: Antonia Maury's father's ancestors were French Huguenots, while her mother was descended from Portuguese nobility.

Antonia Maury was born on March 21, 1866, in Cold Spring, New York, United States to a distinguished family. She was the older daughter of the Reverend Mytton Maury and his wife Virginia Draper. Her maternal uncle was the respected Harvard astronomer, Henry Draper. Astrophotographer, chemist, and physician John William Draper was her maternal grandfather. Her background was rich and varied, for her father was a naturalist and editor of a geographical magazine, as well as a professional minister. Her father's great-grandfather, Reverend James Maury, was the teacher of three American presidents - Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe. Her sister, Carlota Joaquina Maury, became a paleontologist specializing in Venezuelan and Brazilian stratigraphy.

Education

Maury was educated at home with her brother and younger sister until her teenage years. Her father, an Episcopalian minister, was her primary tutor. Maury studied astronomy at Vassar College under Maria Mitchell, America's first woman astronomer, and graduated in 1887 with honors in astronomy, physics, and math. At Vassar, of the 24-semester courses that were required for graduation, Antonia took eight semesters of astronomy, five in English composition, two in philosophy, and one in history. One of 19 students in Maria Mitchell's junior class in 1886-1887, Maury distinguished herself in the lecture presentation that was a class requirement, lecturing on comets.

Career

In 1888, Reverend Maury secured Antonia Maury employment as a so-called Harvard Computers, highly skilled women who processed astronomical data at Harvard College Observatory. Her salary was 25 cents, half the amount paid to men at that time.

Antonia Maury became a central figure in the Henry Draper Catalogue project (funded by her aunt in honor of her husband Henry Draper) as a classifier of stellar spectra. Maury was assigned stars in the northern portion of the sky, while famed astronomer Annie Jump Cannon was assigned the southern half. During her work, Maury discovered that the traditional classification scheme of assigning letters of the alphabet to classes of differing spectral line strengths was inadequate to explain the complexity of the structure being seen. Maury introduced an additional "second dimension" to her classification method, a letter which described the appearance of the spectral lines: "a" for wide and well-defined, "b" for hazy but relatively wide and of same intensity as "a", and "c" for spectra with lines due to hydrogen and helium appearing narrow and sharply defined. Class "ac" represented stars with mixed characteristics.

Maury left Harvard for a teaching job and travel in 1891, suffering from burnout. Documented conflicts with director Edward C. Pickering were a factor as well.

Maury returned to Harvard in 1893 and her catalogue of spectra, in which she described her "c-characteristic," was published in 1897. Pickering did not believe in the validity of Maury's system, and instead, Annie Cannon's system (which did not discuss the appearance of the spectral lines) was accepted as the official method at Harvard, and later worldwide. However, Maury did have her champions. Noted astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung explained in a 1905 paper that the stars which Maury had classified as "c" were in fact not ordinary stars but red giants. "In my opinion," he wrote, "the separation of Antonia C. Maury of the c- and ac-stars is the most important advancement in stellar classification since the trials of Vogel and Secchi." Hertzsprung wrote to Pickering questioning why Maury's work was not utilized in all Harvard catalogues. This work by Hertzspung, as well as work by Henry Norris Russell, forms the basis of our understanding of stellar evolution. Maury had meanwhile left Harvard again in 1896 for teaching jobs and lecturing and did not return to Harvard in earnest until after Pickering's death in 1919 when she turned her attention to spectroscopic binaries and enigmatic binary Beta Lyrae. She also became an adjunct professor. She worked better with Pickering's successor Harlow Shapley, and she stayed in the observatory until her retirement in 1948. Ironically, for this work, she was appointed Pickering fellow for 1919-1920. After retiring, she spent three years as custodian of her uncle's observatory museum in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where she lived until her death.

Achievements

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  Although Pickering continued to downplay the importance of Maury's work, her contribution to spectral analysis was finally acknowledged in 1922. That year, the International Astronomical Union modified its official classification system based on Annie Cannon's system to include the prefix c-to a certain spectral type defined by narrow and sharp lines. Antonia Maury was awarded the Annie J. Cannon Prize of the American Astronomical Society in 1943 and has a lunar crater named in her honor.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Annals of the Astronomical Observatory of Harvard College, Vol. XXVIII.-Part I. Spectra of Bright Stars 1897

Views

Maury's first assignment for Pickering was to determine the orbital period of the spectroscopic binary, Zeta Ursae Majoris, also called Mizar, first discovered by Pickering in 1887. Binaries are stars that orbit so close to each other that they cannot be detected except by a spectroscope. When examined, the spectral lines regularly shift back and forth as the stars revolve around each other. In 1889, Maury independently discovered the second binary, Beta Aurigae and determined its orbital period. Binaries continued to fascinate Maury throughout her career.

Maury's major assignment for the Draper catalog was to observe a group of selected bright northern stars. These were photographed with a more powerful telescope fitted with additional prisms. As she enlarged and studied the spectra under a microscope, they proved much more complex than had ever been previously realized. Fleming had devised an alphabetical system of classification where stars were grouped into alphabetical categories: OBAFGKM - which was remembered through the mnemonic "Oh Be A Fine Girl, Kiss Me." Maury felt this system to be too simplistic, so she replaced it with her own system of 22 groups based on a sequence of descending temperature.

Within each of these groups, however, Maury noticed that two stars having the same pattern of lines and color were displaying differences in line width and sharpness. She decided to introduce three further subdivisions that recognized these features, believing them to signal some property yet to be discovered.

Maury's system brought her into direct conflict with Pickering, who saw no need for the entire project to fall behind schedule so that she could carry out her painstakingly meticulous width and sharpness measurements. Maury was always inclined to solve problems or puzzles that she encountered, and tended to fall behind the schedule that Pickering set for data collection. Finally, the original thinker in Maury could no longer endure Pickering's tunnel vision. She left his group in 1892 without completing the study.

Maury’s painstaking classifications enabled Ejnar Hertzsprung to verify his discovery of two distinct varieties of stars-dwarfs (divisions a and b) and gaints (c). Unfortunately, Hertzsprung’s interpretation was scarcely exploited at Harvard and in later work there, the a, b, c, distinction was largely ignored in favor of the more elementary Draper system, as extended by Annie Jump Cannon.

Maury was also an accomplished ornithologist and a passionate conservationist who fought to save western redwood forests when they were being fed to sawmills to meet the wartime lumber requirements.

Quotations: "I do not think it is fair that I should pass the work into other hands until it can stand as work done by me. I worked out the theory at the cost of much thought and elaborate comparison and I think that I should have full credit for my theory of the relations of the star spectra and also for my theories in regard to Beta Lyrae."

Membership

Maury was a member of the American Astronomical Society, the Royal Astronomical Society, and the National Audubon Society.

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  American Astronomical Society , United States

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  Royal Astronomical Society , United Kingdom

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  National Audubon Society , United States

Personality

Maury's personality was sensitive, imaginative, affectionate. She expressed strong feelings towards unjust, especially concerning scientific recognition.

Quotes from others about the person

• "She was one of the most original thinkers of all the women Pickering employed; but instead of encouraging her attempts at interpreting observations, he was only irritated by her independence and departure from assigned and expected routine." - E. Dorrit Hoffleit, noted astronomer
  
  "Miss Maury was sensitive, imaginative, affectionate, and I feel as if she was a rejected sort of person. I don’t know if anyone had ever shown her much affection…. Nobody had ever listened to her…. She was a woman of great courage and warmth of heart…" - Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, British-born American astronomer and astrophysicist

Interests

• ornithology

Connections

Antonia Maury was never married and had no children.

Father:

Mytton Maury

Mother:

Virginia Draper

Sister:

Carlota Joaquina Maury

Grandfather:

John Draper

Uncle:

Henry Draper

second greatuncle:

Matthew Maury

colleague:

Annie Cannon

colleague:

Williamina Fleming

References

• Dictionary of Scientific Biography: Volumes 9 & 10
  1981