Biography On Antonia Maury

Antonia Maury

Antonia Maury was born in Cold Spring, New York on March 21, 1866.  Her full name is Antonia Caetana de Paiva Pereira Maury.  Both of her parents had connections to science.  Antonia’s dad (Mytton Maury) was a protestant minister.  He educated her until she ended up going to Vassar College, where Maria Mitchell then got her interested in astronomy.  Her mother was Virginia Draper Maury, who was Henry Draper’s sister.  Maury graduated with honors from Vassar College in 1887 and was a student of Maria Mitchell.  Maury graduated in 1887 with honors in astronomy, physics, and philosophy.  Then, her father asked Pickering to employ Antonia in her work, and she was added to his staff of women “computers.

            Pickering hired Maury in 1888 as a computer; because of the endowment to Harvard College Observatory for the Henry Draper Catalogue protect her aunt Anna Draper.  Her job was to compute, record, and catalogue stellar spectra for the stars in the northern hemisphere.  But, this job proved too monotonous for Maury because her interest leaned more towards theoretical work.  She found that stars were more complex than previously thought, and she found that OBAFGKM was too simplistic for what she was dealing with.  So, Antonia replaced it with her own system of 22 groups based on a sequence of descending temperature.  Within the groups, she noticed that two stars with the same pattern of lines and color were portraying differences in line width and sharpness.  So, Maury began to make subdivisions for the star groups with these properties.  Unfortunately, Pickering frowned upon theoretical work in his computers.  So, the relationship between the two became tense.  This, in turn, caused her intermittent employment during her years at Harvard College Observatory.  She soon proved to be one of Pickering’s most original thinkers, but he was only annoyed, instead of proud, about her independence. So, Antonia ended up leaving his group in 1892 without completing her studies because she could no longer stand having her original thinking mind enduring Pickering’s tunnel vision.

            Although Pickering might not have appreciated Antonia’s uniqueness, one person did take notice of her classification skills.  Danish astrophysicist Ejnar Hertzprung objected strongly to the omission of Maury’s classification in the completed catalog.  He thought her separation of the c and ac stars was a very important advancement in stellar classification.  So, Hertzprung went on to make the Hertzprung-Russell diagram, in which her thoughts were incorporated.  There were many star catalogs published, but only Maury’s classification provided the distinction that Hertzprung was searching for.  Pickering might have misjudged the importance of Maury’s work, but her work for spectral analysis was finally recognized in 1922.  This was when the International Astronomical Union modified its official classification system based on Antonia Maury’s system to include the prefix c-to a certain spectral type defined by narrow and sharp lines. 

            Maury continued to work on her spectral project , even after leaving Harvard Observatory.  Pickering made her choose between completing her work, or turning her work over to somebody else.  She did want to finish her project, but she wanted to be recognized for her work.  Antonia even told Pickering herself that nobody else should do her work, because they were her own ideas and she wanted to be acknowledged for them.  Maury wanted full credit for her theory of the relations of the star spectra and also for her theories in regard to Beta Lyrae.  Pickering wrote back crudely, wanting her to settle for standard acknowledgement, which Maury would not settle for.  But, in the end, she got her way.  Her catalog became the first issue to have the name of a woman on the title page, in volume 28 of the Harvard Annals in 1897.  She had 4,800 photographs of which her work was based on, with 681 northern stars classified according to her system.

            Antonia continued to study spectroscopic binary stars.  She returned to Harvard over a decade later, after the publication of her catalog.  Maury started to focus more attention onto the complex spectroscopic binary, Beta Lyrae.  She apparently examined almost 300 spectra for this star, and published her results in a treatise published in the Harvard Annals in 1933. 

            Maury taught a lot in the 1890s.  She taught in Massachusetts and New York.  She then went on to give lectures on astronomy at Cornell and other such colleges, to different groups of people.  Antonia then went back to Harvard in 1918 as an adjunct professor, and she was able to work better with Pickering’s successor, Harlow Shapley.  Up until she retired in 1948 she examine the spectra of Beta Lyrae. 

            Antonia Maury was also an accomplished ornithologist and a conservationist.  She fought to save forests and became a member of societies such as the American Astronomical Society, the Royal Astronomical Society, and the National Audubon Society.  Maury then died at a hospital in Dobbs Ferry, New York on January 8, 1952.

            After Maury passed, Cecilia Pyne-Gaposchin, who worked at the Harvard Observatory starting in 1923, talked about her and her work habits.  According to Payne-Gaposchkin, Maury enjoyed talking a lot as an outlet, and nobody would ever listen to her scientific questionings, as far as she knew.