Astrophysicist fought prejudice to shed light on origins of life and the universe
Margaret Burbidge astrophysicist b August 12, 1919 d April 5, 2020
Professor Margaret Burbidge, who has died aged 100, was a pioneering astrophysicist who became famous as much for her championing of the rights of women and minorities in science as for her groundbreaking research.
Faced with sexual discrimination throughout her career, she was helped by her husband, Geoffrey, to gain unofficial access to the world’s best observatory, where she gathered data that led to the theory of the creation of the elements that compose stars and, ultimately, the origins of the universe.
The Burbidges contributed the data to the paper Synthesis of the Elements of Stars, better known as B2FH – an acronym of their initials and those of their collaborators,
William Fowler and Fred Hoyle.
Published in 1957, the paper outlined the theory of how, ultimately, all the chemical compounds that create life are formed from elements originating from stars, or ‘‘stardust’’, as it became popularly known.
The paper remains hugely influential, laying the foundations for a new kind of astronomical observation, combining nuclear and particle science, and setting the scene for modern astrophysics and cosmology.
Eleanor Margaret Peachey was born in northwest England, to Stanley, a research chemist at the Manchester School of Technology, and his wife Marjorie, a teacher. She fell in love with the stars at the age of 4 when, on a stormy trip across the English Channel, her mother pointed out constellations to distract her from seasickness.
She studied physics at University College London, where she was one of just four students (and the only woman) to specialise in astronomy. She graduated with a first in 1939.
After the war she married Geoffrey Burbidge and in 1951 they left Britain to work at the Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago. Geoffrey received the Carnegie Fellowship, an award for which Margaret had previously been turned down. It allowed him to work at the Mt Wilson Observatory outside Pasadena in California; however, as was made clear in Margaret’s rejection letter of 1947, the observatory had only one lavatory, which made the premises ‘‘suitable for men only’’. This also meant the couple were not allowed to live in staff dormitories. They had to live in an unheated cabin further afield.
Margaret officially-worked as a research fellow at the California Institute of Technology. Her husband, however, would often arrange access to the telescope at the observatory for her, passing her off as his assistant as she worked on what would become her contribution to Synthesis of the Elements of Stars. For their part in this work, she and her husband were awarded the American Astronomical Society’s Helen B Warner Prize in 1959, the highest honour bestowed on young astronomers. Yet it was another decade before the Mt Wilson Observatory officially admitted women. In various post around the US, Margaret was repeatedly forced to accept lower salaries and less notable roles than her husband.
She moved on to study the science of quasars, celestial entities that are believed to be the brightest objects at the centre of galaxies. As objects move away from us in the expanding universe, light from them is ‘‘shifted’’ to longer wavelengths – which means red in the visible spectrum. Quasars have a very high redshift, as this is known, suggesting they are very distant objects created early in the universe’s history.
Margaret Burbidge, however, located some high redshift quasars within low redshift galaxies, suggesting they are much closer to us, and thus younger, than first thought. This notion challenged the existing Big Bang theory for the origin of the universe. Instead, Burbidge and her husband embraced the theory that the universe was created by several smaller bangs.
While this did not win widespread acceptance, she continued to research galaxies as ‘‘the building blocks of the universe’’. In 1972 she returned to Britain to take up the post of director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, but caused an up roar when she criticised the quality of British astronomy as ‘‘third-rate’’ in a letter to the journal Nature; she resigned after 16 months to return to research.
Her last major achievement was as a cocreator of the Faint Object Spectrograph, an instrument installed on the Hubble Space Telescope that provides data on the nature of black holes and quasars.
In 1973, Margaret Burbidge rejected the American Astronomical Society’s Annie J Cannon prize, an accolade reserved for women, stating that any discrimination, in favour or against women, was undesirable. ‘‘Because of the small number of women in the field,’’ she said, ‘‘I would not be surprised if we all in our turn are selected for the prize.’’
She did, however, become the first female president of the society, and the first female astronomer to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences. She served as president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and became the first woman to receive the Astronomy Society of the Pacific’s prize for lifetime achievement.
She is survived by a daughter. Her husband died in 2010. –