Cecilia Payne was an astronomer who discovered what stars are made of. She wrote about it in 1925, in her PhD thesis at Harvard University. Someone else told her she was wrong but then published similar results several years later. But now Harvard University, where Cecilia was a professor, has a lecture series named after her.

Cecilia was born in England, but in her time, the only job she thought women could have in her country was teaching, so she came to the United States for more options. As she studied astronomy, she figured out that the sun and the other stars were made up mostly of hydrogen, even though at the time most people thought something very different. She also studied the Milky Way, and the evolution of stars.

Because of everything she found out, she didn’t just change the world; she changed how we thought about the whole universe.

I have a genetic disorder called Turner syndrome. This means I have only one X chromosome, instead of two like other girls. This is one of the things I am made of. I am also made of marmalade toast and a love of lab coats. I am made of my family, including a brand-new niece who is also named Cecilia. We both have long scars from where we had heart surgeries. Stars are made of whizzing, flashing chemicals and power and heat, and maybe scars are what show us that we’re made of all that, too.

This is one of the ways Cecilia Payne is an inspiration to me, as a girl with Turner syndrome. She figured out new and marvelous things about stars and the galaxy even though lots of people thought she couldn’t. She figured out that even though some stars are big, some are small, some are red, and some are white, some are round or lopsided or spotted, they’re all made up of the same stuff.

Maybe Cecilia felt a little bit different as a woman in the Astronomy Department at Harvard in the 1920s. I know sometimes I feel different as a girl with a missing chromosome. But when it comes down to it, when you get down to atoms and the humanness that holds our atoms together, we’re all basically made up of the same stuff, too.

That’s why, for my educational project on Cecilia Payne, I decided to make an exhibit at my school that combined stars with beautiful scans of the human brain. For my project I created a long black display of the night sky, with precisely measured constellations, but instead of stars I used small cutouts of colorful PET brain scans. They glowed pink and green and blue, perfect against the black background.

When students at my school walked past this exhibit, they also saw a poster of Cecilia Payne, complete with her story about discovering what stars are made of. They read about her, learned her name, and might now think about her whenever they look up at the night sky. Or, maybe, when they wonder what they are made of.