Passage:
In her 1925 doctoral dissertation, astronomer Cecilia Payne argued that hydrogen and helium were vastly more abundant in stellar atmospheres than on Earth, contradicting the prevailing early-twentieth-century consensus that the Sun and stars shared a chemical composition virtually identical to Earth's crust. Analyzing the spectral lines of stars using the thermal ionization equation developed by Indian physicist Meghnad Saha, Payne established that the apparent spectral differences among stars derived primarily from varying surface temperatures rather than differences in elemental abundance. Although astronomer Henry Norris Russell initially persuaded Payne to tone down her conclusion—attributing the anomalous hydrogen readings to an observational artifact—Russell independently confirmed her findings four years later through a different analytical method, subsequently publishing his results in 1929 with explicit acknowledgment of Payne's foundational work.
According to the passage, Payne's determination of stellar elemental abundances relied directly on which of the following?
- The application of Meghnad Saha's thermal ionization equation to stellar spectral linesCevap
- BAn analytical method independently introduced by Henry Norris Russell in 1929
- CDirect chemical sampling comparing Earth's core to stellar interiors
- DThe assumption that surface temperature variations had negligible impact on spectral lines
- EObservational data gathered by Russell to demonstrate anomalous hydrogen readings