Eleanor Margaret Burbidge, FRS (née Peachey;

8 min readJun 14, 2021

Eleanor Margaret Burbidge, FRS (née Peachey; 12 August 1919–5 April 2020) was a British-American observational astronomer and astrophysicist. In the 1950s, she was one of the founders of stellar nucleosynthesis and was first author of the influential B2FH paper. During the 1960s and 70s she worked on galaxy rotation curves and quasars, discovering the most distant astronomical object then known. In the 1980s and 90s she helped develop and utilise the Faint Object Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope. Burbidge was well known for her work opposing discrimination against women in astronomy.

Burbidge held several leadership and administrative posts, including Director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory (1973–75), President of the American Astronomical Society (1976–78), and President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1983). Burbidge worked at the University of London Observatory, Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago, the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of California San Diego (UCSD). From 1979 to 1988 she was the first director of the Center for Astronomy and Space Sciences at UCSD, where she worked from 1962 until her retirement.

Research career[edit]

Burbidge studied at University College London (UCL), where she received an undergraduate degree in 1939 and a PhD in 1943.[1] During World War II, she acted as a caretaker at University of London Observatory (ULO); the wartime blackout made it easier for her to use the observatory’s telescopes.[2] In August 1944, her observations at ULO were twice interrupted by V-1 flying bomb explosions nearby.[1] She was turned down for a postdoctoral fellowship from Carnegie Observatories in 1945 because the job required observing at Mount Wilson Observatory, which was reserved for men only at that time.[3][4] Shortly after the war, 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.[1]

In 1951 she took a position at the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory, Wisconsin, her first job in the United States.[5] 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.[1] The team combined data on elemental abundances produced by the Burbidges with Hoyle’s hypothesis that all chemical elements might be produced in stars by a series of nuclear reactions, and Fowler’s laboratory experiments on those reactions.[1] The idea became known as stellar nucleosynthesis. They published their model in a series of papers,[6][7][8] culminating in a magnum opus in 1957,[9] now known as the B2FH 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.[1][10][11] The paper demonstrated that most heavier chemical elements were formed in stellar evolution.[12] 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.[1]

When Fowler moved back to the US, he advised the Burbidges to come with him to California, suggesting Margaret (the observer) should re-apply for the fellowship at Mount Wilson Observatory while Geoff (the theorist) should seek the Kellogg Fellowship at Caltech.[10] Margaret’s application was again refused on gender grounds, so the couple swapped applications. Geoff won the position at Mount Wilson, while Margaret took the Caltech job in 1955. Whenever Geoff was required to go observing on Mount Wilson, Margaret would accompany him, ostensibly as his assistant.[10] In reality, Geoff worked in the photographic dark room while Margaret operated the telescope.[1] When the observatory’s management found out, they eventually agreed that she could observe there, but only if she and her husband stayed in a separate self-catered cottage on the grounds, rather than the catered dormitory which had been designed for men only.[2]

She joined the University of California San Diego (UCSD) in 1962.[5] In the 1960s and 1970s she measured the masses, compositions, and rotation curves of galaxies and performed early spectroscopic studies of quasars.[11] Her discoveries in this area included QSO B1442+101 at a redshift of 3.5, making it the most distant known object at the time, a record which she held from 1974–82.[1][13] 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.[5]

https://vexare4629.medium.com/fluorodeoxyglucose-18f-inn-or-fluorodeoxyglucose-f-18-f29c77743092
https://vexare4629.medium.com/nuclear-transmutation-1d39408db57e

Eleanor Margaret Burbidge, FRS (née Peachey;

Contents

Research career[edit]

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