Everything about Margaret Burbidge totally explained
Margaret Burbidge (born
August 12,
1919 in
Davenport) is an
English astrophysicist, noted for original research and holding many administrative posts, including director of the
Royal Greenwich Observatory.
During her career she served at the
University of London Observatory,
Yerkes Observatory of the
University of Chicago,
Cavendish Laboratory in
Cambridge, England, the
California Institute of Technology, and from
1979 to
1988 was first director of the
Center for Astronomy and Space Sciences at the
University of California at San Diego (UCSD), where she worked from
1962 on.
Career
Burbidge started studying astronomy in
1936 at
University College, London, graduated in
1939 and received her PhD at University College in
1943. She was turned down for a
Carnegie Fellowship in
1945 because this fellowship would have meant that she'd have had to observe at
Mount Wilson observatory, which was reserved for men only at that time.
In
1950, she applied for a grant at the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, and went to the United States in
1951. She went back to England in
1953 and started research in collaboration with her husband,
Fred Hoyle, and
William Alfred Fowler. The resulting theory was called th B
2FH theory after the participants.
After ten years, in
1955, she finally gained access to the Mount Wilson Observatory, posing as her husband's assistant. When the management found out, they eventually agreed that she could stay, if she and her husband went to live in a separate cottage on the grounds rather than using the men's dormitory.
Her
1972 directorship of the Royal Greenwich Observatory was also the first time in 300 years that that directorship wasn't associated with the post of the
Astronomer Royal, which was given to radio astronomer and later
Nobel prize winner
Martin Ryle instead. She left this post in 1974, fifteen months after accepting it, when controversy broke out over moving the telescope in the Observatory to a more useful location.
Experiences such as these turned Burbidge into one of the foremost and most influential personalities in the fight to end discrimination of women in astronomy. Consequently, in
1972 she turned down the
Annie J. Cannon Award of the
American Astronomical Society because it was awarded to women only: "It is high time that discrimination in favor of, as well as against, women in professional life be removed".
In
1976, she became president of the American Astronomy society, and in
1977, became a United States citizen. In
1983 she was elected president of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science; she's also served as vice-president and president of the American Astronomical Society.
Family
On April 2,
1948, she married
Geoffrey Burbidge, a theoretical astrophysicist. Their daughter Sarah was born in late
1956.
Scientific achievements
After receiving her PhD in 1943, she started to research
galaxies by linking a
spectrograph to
telescopes. At the Yerkes Observatory in the USA her work involved studying B
stars and galaxy structure.
In
1957, the B
2FH group showed the famous result that all of the
elements except the very lightest are produced by
nuclear processes inside stars. For this they received the
Warner Prize in
1959. In her later research she was one of the first to measure the masses and rotation curves of
galaxies and was one of the pioneers in the study of
quasars.
At UCSD she also helped develop the faint object spectrograph in
1990 for the
Hubble Space Telescope. Currently, she's a professor emeritus of physics at UCSD and continues to be active in research, i.a. engaging in
non-standard cosmologies like
intrinsic redshift
Honors
Awards
References and notes
Further Information
Get more info on 'Margaret Burbidge'.
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