In 2018 the International Astronomical Union named a star after an Indian physicist. She had been dead for 27 years. In her whole life, not one of India's 3 science academies had made her a member. Her name was Bibha Chowdhuri. She was born in 1913. She took her master's degree in physics from Calcutta University in 1936. She was the only woman in her class. She joined the physicist D M Bose and began working on cosmic rays, the particles that come down on the earth from space. The work was physically hard. To catch cosmic rays you have to go high up, or deep down. She went to Darjeeling. She went to the Alps in France. She went down into the mines at the Kolar Gold Fields. Getting to some of those stations meant riding mules up into the mountains carrying the equipment. The method was to expose photographic plates to cosmic rays for long periods and then study the tracks the particles left behind on them. Between 1939 and 1944, working this way, she and Bose found the track of a particle that had never been recorded before, about 200 times the mass of an electron. They published their results in the journal Nature. They knew what they had. They also knew their plates were not sensitive enough to measure it properly. So they asked for better ones. The plates came from England. The Second World War was on, and the supply stopped. The research ended there. After the war, an English physicist named Cecil Powell got hold of the sensitive plates, used the same photographic method, and identified the particle now called the pion. In 1950 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for it. He mentioned their work in his book. The world forgot it anyway. She carried on. She earned a doctorate in Manchester. She came back and became the first woman scientist recruited by the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research. She stayed at the bottom of the academic ladder for the rest of her working life. No major prize. No academy membership. When the Indian Academy of Sciences later published a book on 100 Indian women scientists, she was not in it. She died in 1991. The recognition began about 27 years after that. In 2018 a biography of her was published. The same year the International Astronomical Union took a white dwarf star and named it Bibha. In 2020 the government created a chair professorship in her name at TIFR. She spent her working life looking up at the sky through photographic plates, in mountains and mine shafts, for particles nobody could see. There is a star up there with her name on it now, and she never knew.