18-Year-Old Student Discovers Comet Break-Up

There seems to be a growing trend of young amateur astronomers. In 2009, Caroline Moore, a 14 year-old at the time became the youngest person to discover a supernova- http://www.astronomy.com/en/News-Observing/News/2009/06/Profile%20Youngest%20person%20to%20discover%20a%20supernova.aspx [astronomy.com]. She was then shortly thereafter surpassed by the 10-year old Kathryn Aurora Gray http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/01/04/girl-10-becomes-youngest-to-discover-supernova/ [cnn.com] If one is at all old this thing starts to really make one feel unaccomplished by comparison.

One thing you might notice is that all of these people are female. I tentatively don't think this is a coincidence but at the same time don't think this is a strong example of the growth of females in science (although it certainly should help inspire other young girls). There's been for a very long history of women astronomers. While the specific example prior to about 1850 there are isolated examples like Caroline Herschel http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caroline_Herschel [wikipedia.org] but in the second half of the 19th century a large number of women went into astronomy related work. Examples include Antonia Maury who did some of the first careful analysis and cataloging of stellar spectra http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonia_Maury [wikipedia.org] and Annie Jump Cannon who followed on Maury's and others work making systematic the correlations between spectra, temperature and brightness, a crucial issue for trying to estimate the distance of any start that is more than a few hundred light years away http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Jump_Cannon [wikipedia.org]. And then you have Henrietta Swan Leavitt http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrietta_Swan_Leavitt [wikipedia.org] who discovered Cepheid variable stars which allow one to extend distance estimates even farther, to outside our own galaxy. One thing that is important to notice is that a lot of these early female astronomers were doing work careful cataloging and classification work that was actually considered women's work and considered to be not that important by many. Thus, they got a lot less credit in their lifetimes than male astronomers. So at least that aspect has changed a lot.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/ZlxM_vf4RPM/18-Year-Old-Student-Discovers-Comet-Break-Up

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