WOMEN IN HISTORY..STAR GAZER
The origin of life on Earth stands as one of the great mysteries of science. Various answers have been proposed, all of which remain unverified. To find out if we are alone in the galaxy, we will need to better understand what geochemical conditions nurtured the first life forms. What water, chemistry and temperature cycles fostered the chemical reactions that allowed life to emerge on our planet? Because life arose in the largely unknown surface conditions of Earth’s early history, answering these and other questions remains a challenge.
Several seminal experiments in this topic have been conducted at the University of Chicago, including the Miller-Urey experiment that suggested how the building blocks of life could form in a primordial soup.
Eleanor Margaret Burbidge, FRS (n̩e Peachey; 12 August 1919 Р5 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.
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves.” (Julius Caesar, Act I, Scene 2) These quotes, taken from two well-known Shakespeare plays, act as an epigraph to "Synthesis of the Elements in Stars", the paper written by E. Margaret Burbidge, G. R. Burbidge, William Fowler, and Fred Hoyle.
n the 1950s, her collaborations about the chemical composition of stars collected together many separate threads and summarized a general picture that was highly influential: how stars work and where the heavy elements come from. Burbidge was first author, in 1957, of “The Synthesis of the Elements in Stars,” published in Reviews of Modern Physics, written with her husband, the late theoretical astrophysicist Geoffrey Burbidge, and late physicists Willy Fowler and Fred Hoyle. Known as B2FH, after their last names, this magnum opus demonstrated a deep relationship between observational astronomy and nuclear physics. B2FH hypothesized that stars produced all of the chemical elements heavier than hydrogen that are present in the universe. It is considered one of the most influential scientific papers of its era. The theory they developed remains the fundamental basis for stellar nucleosynthesis.
Instrumentation onboard the Hubble Space Telescope was directly influenced by Burbidge. Her work studying quasars has also been fundamental to astronomy. She applied her expertise in spectroscopy to elucidate the properties of quasars from shortly after their discovery in the early 1960s through the end of her career.
In 1983, Burbidge was awarded the National Medal of Sciences. At UC San Diego, where she was from 1962–1988, the Margaret Burbidge Visiting Professorship was established, which brings eminent female physicists to the university for collaborative research and mentorship within the Department of Physics. She will be remembered as one of the great observational astronomers and for advancing women in the field of astronomy. She is survived by her daughter, Sarah.
