Eleanor Margaret Burbidge, (; 12&nbsp;August 1919 – 5&nbsp;April 2020) From 1948-51, she taught astronomy at ULO to undergraduate students from across the University of London system, including Arthur C. Clarke who was then an undergraduate at King's College London. Her research during this period focused on the abundances of chemical elements in stars. She returned to the UK in 1953, when Margaret and her husband Geoffrey Burbidge were invited to work with William Alfred Fowler and Fred Hoyle at the University of Cambridge. culminating in a magnum opus in 1957, now known as the B<sup>2</sup>FH paper after the initials of Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler & Hoyle. Margaret Burbidge was the first author of the paper, which was written while she was pregnant. The paper demonstrated that most heavier chemical elements were formed in stellar evolution. The theory they developed remains the fundamental basis for stellar nucleosynthesis. Fowler was later awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar) for his work on nucleosynthesis, and expressed surprise that Burbidge was not included. She was a supporter of the steady state theory of cosmology, but her own work on quasars helped to support the alternative Big Bang theory. For 300&nbsp;years the post had always been held by the Astronomer Royal, but in 1972 the positions were split, with Martin Ryle appointed as Astronomer Royal and Burbidge as RGO director. The official explanation was that because Ryle was a radio astronomer, he was unsuitable to lead an optical observatory. Burbidge sometimes attributed the split to sexism, Burbidge left the RGO in 1974, fifteen months after joining, due to controversy over moving the Isaac Newton Telescope from RGO headquarters at Herstmonceux Castle to Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in the Canary Islands. Her letter declining the prize caused the AAS to set up its first committee on the status of women in astronomy. During her term as president she convinced the members to ban AAS meetings in states which had not ratified the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution.

From 1979 to 1988, she served as the first director of the UCSD's Center for Astrophysics and Space Science. She was the daughter of Marjorie Stott Peachey and Stanley John Peachey; her father was a lecturer in chemistry at the Manchester School of Technology (now part of the University of Manchester) and her mother was one of his students. Margaret Burbidge died on 5&nbsp;April 2020, in San Francisco at age&nbsp;100 after a fall.

Honors

Awards

  • Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy, 1959, awarded jointly with Geoffrey Burbidge, for the B<sup>2</sup>FH paper
  • President, American Astronomical Society (1976-1978)
  • Member of the American Philosophical Society (1980)
  • Catherine Wolfe Bruce medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (1982)
  • President, American Association for the Advancement of Science (1983)
  • Inducted into the Women's Museum of California Hall of Fame (2003)
  • Gold Medal of the Royal Astronomical Society, with Geoffrey Burbidge (2005)

Named after her

  • Asteroid 5490 Burbidge
  • Burbidge's Chain, a group of galaxies located in Cetus

See also

  • Timeline of women in science

References

Further reading

  • Her autobiography:
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  • — Short biography
  • — Personal web page at UCSD physics.