Margaret Burbidge Biography

Born in England, Margaret Burbidge educated at the University of London, where she remained until 1951. She has worked at Yerkes Observatory and the California Institute of Technology and has been at the University of California, San Diego since 1962. She has held many administrative positions, including that of director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory and first director of the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences at UCSD. In 1957 she, Geoffrey R. Burbidge, William A. Fowler and Fred Hoyle showed how all of the elements except the very lightest are produced by nuclear reactions in stellar interiors. She has also studied spectra of galaxies, determining their rotations, masses, and chemical composition, and she has achieved particular renown for spectroscopic studies of quasars. She has played a major role in developing instrumentation for the Hubble Space Telescope. She was won dozens of awards in her time including the Helen Warner Prize in 1959, the Henry Norris Russel Lectureship in 1984, the National Medal of Science in 1983, the Karl G. Jansky Lecturship in 1977, The Royal Astronomical Study Gold medal in 2005 and even the Albert Einstein World Award of Science in 1988. With nuclear physicist William A. Fowler, astrophysicist Fred Hoyle, and her husband, astronomer Geoffrey Burbidge, she developed a better explanation of how elements are formed by nuclear reactions inside stars. She was born into a very scientific family with her mother and father Marjorie and Stanley Peachey both being chemists and she appoints much of her success to her family. She married her husband Geoffrey in 1948 and had a daughter, Sarah, in 1956. She was the first woman to be appointed director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory. Burbidge served as assistant director (1948–50) and acting director (1950–51) of the Observatory of the University of London. In 1955 her husband, theoretical astrophysicist Geoffrey Burbidge, obtained a Carnegie fellowship for astronomical research at the Mount Wilson Observatory, near Pasadena, California, U.S. Because women were then ineligible for such an appointment, she chose to accept a minor research post at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena. In 1957 she became Shirley Farr fellow and, later, associate professor at Yerkes Observatory, Williams Bay, Wisconsin. For several years she worked as a chemist instead of an astronomer, as rules forbidding nepotism left her unable to work in her specialty at the universities that employed her husband. She served as research astronomer (1962–64) and thereafter as professor of astronomy at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), taking a leave of absence to serve as director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory (1972–73). Her Greenwich duties did not come with the traditional honorary title of Astronomer Royal, which instead was given to a male astronomer; Burbidge saw this as another instance of discrimination against women in the astronomical community. In 1972 she refused the Annie J. Cannon Prize from the American Astronomical Society (AAS) because, as it was an award for women only, it represented for her another facet of the same discrimination. Her action led to the formation of a standing AAS committee for the status of women in astronomy. Burbidge later became a naturalized American citizen. As part of her work in quasars, Burbidge, along with Sir Fred Hoyle and Will Fowler, created the B²FH theory. This theory, published in 1957, provided a revolutionary explanation of the origin in stars of all the elements in the periodic table from helium to iron, starting with the lightest element, hydrogen. Her publications include Quasi-Stellar Objects (1967), with Geoffrey Burbidge. Still alive today, Burbidge continues to teach and was inducted into the Women's Museum of California Hall of Fame honoring her career and achievements. She is currently 94 and still has a passionate love for astrophysics that will be remembered for centuries to come.