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Overlooked No More: Ruby Payne-Scott, Who Explored Space With Radio Waves

Payne-Scott helped establish the field of radio astronomy by using radio waves to detect solar bursts, but she was forced to resign after she got married.

Ruby Payne-Scott in an undated photograph. In the 1940s, she helped lay the foundation for a new field of science called radio astronomy.

Since 1851, obituaries in The New York Times have been dominated by white men. With Overlooked, we’re adding the stories of remarkable people whose deaths went unreported in The Times.

Every so often our sun emits an invisible burst of energy.

This energy ripples through space as electromagnetic waves and then crashes into planets and meteors and space debris and one another, causing a great cacophony above and around us.

A cacophony that was inaudible, until Ruby Payne-Scott entered a laboratory.

In the 1940s, Payne-Scott helped lay the foundation for a new field of science called radio astronomy. Her work led to the discovery of deep-space phenomena like black holes and pulsars and later helped astronauts understand how solar storms disrupt weather in space and electrical grids on Earth.

Yet as a married woman she was denied equal employment status and compensation. She challenged the scientific establishment in her native Australia and fought for the rights of women in the workplace, but ultimately left science to raise her children full time.

World War II opened the door to Payne-Scott’s scientific career. The Australian armed forces needed physicists, and men were joining the military to fight instead.

Bored with her job at Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia), where she cataloged and calibrated equipment for radio technicians, Payne-Scott applied for a government posting seeking a physicist. Her experience piqued the interest of the government’s Council for Scientific and Industrial Research. There she became one of two women working as research scientists in the division of radio physics, a laboratory with a top-secret mission: to enable radar systems to track incoming Japanese fighter planes.

Radar was already in use on the European front, but the same systems were not working properly in the Southern Hemisphere, leaving Allied forces and Australian citizens vulnerable.

Payne-Scott determined that tropical weather in the Pacific was to blame. She created a device called an S-band noise tube to check the sensitivity of receivers and measure the intensity of incoming signals.

“She understood the hardware, but she also understood the physics, which is incredible,” said Miller Goss, astronomer emeritus at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory and the author of “Making Waves,” a biography of Payne-Scott. “No radio astronomer in the 21st century could do something like that.”

Payne-Scott became an expert at distinguishing Japanese aircraft from other sources of radio static, like ships, lighthouses, buildings and cliffs. This enabled scientists to track planes from farther away, even at night and during storms — a vast improvement over relying on the naked eye to spot the enemy.

By 1944, with the war turning in the Allies’ favor, Payne-Scott and other scientists began searching for postwar applications for their research. A British physicist, James Stanley Hey, wrote a classified report that was circulated among just a few Allied scientists, including Payne-Scott. It hypothesized that a mysterious radio noise was coming not from aircraft or signal jamming, but rather from the sun.

Hey’s report inspired Payne-Scott to join the race to legitimize a new branch of science: radio astronomy.

Ruby Violet Payne-Scott was born in South Grafton, New South Wales, on May 28, 1912, to Cyril and Amy (Neale) Payne-Scott. Home-schooled until age 11, she ultimately landed a spot at the prestigious Sydney Girls High School, graduating at 16. She earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics from the University of Sydney — only the third woman to do so, Goss said in an interview.

But there were few opportunities for physicists or women when Payne-Scott earned her graduate degree in 1936, so she became a schoolteacher and then took the job at Amalgamated Wireless.

She married William Hall in 1944. They shared political views that were fairly radical; they were feminists, environmental conservationists, atheists and communists. Some of Payne-Scott’s colleagues called her “Red Ruby.”

But her marriage would present a problem: Women in public service were expected to resign when they wed. Her colleagues at the government research center considered her so integral to their work that they helped keep her marriage a secret; she wore her wedding band on a necklace.

Image
Ms. Payne-Scott visiting with colleagues at a conference in 1952, a year after she left her job at an Australian government laboratory. She was told that as a married woman she could not work full time.Credit...ATNF Historical Photographic Archive

Her boss, J.L. Pawsey, “valued her judgment and experience so highly that when she was absent from a meeting, he would often not make a final decision until she had been consulted,” Goss wrote in “Making Waves.”

She maintained her secret for several years, during which she helped Pawsey discover what would become known as Type I solar bursts. Their work, published in the journal Nature in February 1946, demonstrated that electromagnetic waves were spewing from the sun. Unlike solar flares, which were visible during eclipses using traditional telescopes, these spontaneous emissions were now detectable using radios.

Payne-Scott would later discover two more types of solar bursts and help create a device called the swept-lobe interferometer, which panned the sky dozens of times per second, allowing radio astronomers to identify and zoom in on single wave formations.

Her final contribution “predicted the whole future of radio astronomy,” Goss said. Like watching an instant replay from multiple camera angles at the same time, her method gave radio astronomers a more complete picture of the frequency and shape of waves emanating from space. Martin Ryle shared the 1974 Nobel Prize in Physics using this method.

Then, in 1950, the department was restructured, and in the process Payne-Scott’s marriage was uncovered by regulators.

“There were many men who were very unsympathetic to the notion that women would continue to work after they were married,” said Claire Hooker, senior lecturer in health and medical humanities at the University of Sydney.

“You didn’t have two breadwinners in the family,” she continued. “And it was just assumed that it was the man’s job to win the bread.”

Payne-Scott challenged the rule, taking her fight to the head of the department in a series of contentious letters. But she was forced to resign and give up her pension.

Pawsey hired her back on “temporary” status and gave her a raise, but she decided to leave the lab a year later, five months pregnant and excited to become a mother.

Her son, Peter Gavin Hall, became an influential statistician. Her daughter, Fiona Margaret Hall, born in 1953, is a prominent Australian artist currently working on a war memorial.

Payne-Scott died of complications of dementia on May 25, 1981. She was 68.

Hall said in an interview that while her mother was known publicly for being outspoken, she lived a relatively quiet family life in the suburbs of Sydney — except for the occasional trip to protest the Vietnam War.

But sometimes, she said, “as a child you’d ask her a question, a classic childhood question like ‘Why does the sun come up in the morning,’ and my mum would always have a very complicated answer.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section B, Page 6 of the New York edition with the headline: Ruby Payne-Scott, Who Explored Space With Radio Waves. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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