Margaret Burbudge Biography

      Eleanor Margaret Peachey, later to become Margaret Burbidge, was born in Davenport, England, in August 1919. She is a British-born American astrophysicist. She started studying astronomy in 1936 at the University College in London. She graduated in 1943 with a PhD. She then started to research galaxies through linking a spectrograph to telescopes. At the Yerkes Observatory in the USA her work involved studying B type stars and galaxy structures. In 1945 she was turned down from a Carnegie Fellowship because the Mount Wilson Observatory was only accessible to men at the time. Her undergraduate work was in physics at the University of London where she graduated in 1948. In that year, she married Geoffrey Burbidge, a theoretical physicist. They collaborated on many successful projects in both of their careers.

        In 1950, she applied for a grant at the Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin. She went to the U.S. for two years in 1951. When she returned to England in 1953, she began researching with Fred Hoyle, William Fowler, and her husband, Geoffrey Burbidge. Together, they published a paper in the Reviews of Modern Physics to demonstrate how elements are synthesized in the nuclear reactors of stars. This study created the B²FH theory.      

        Ten years after being turned down by Carnegie, she was admitted to the Mount Wilson Observatory in 1955. She worked as her husband's assistant until administration found out and allowed her to stay as long as she and her husband stayed in a separate cottage on grounds, rather than in the dormitories.  

         In 1957, the B²FH group presented the result of their studies; elements, except the very lightest, are made through nuclear processes inside of the stars. This discovery won the Warner Prize in 1959. One of Margaret's other significant achievements was that she was one of the first to measure the masses and rotation curves of galaxies and was one of the first to make discoveries regarding quasars.

        She has been noted for original research and holding many administrative posts, including director of the Royal Greenwhich Observatory. She has served at the Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago, University of London Observatory and the California Institute of Technology. From 1979 to 1988 she was also the first director of the Center for Astronomy and Space Sciences at the at USCD. She has been working in this position since 1962. Margaret Burbidge was awarded by President Reagan the National Medal of Science in February of 1985. The asteroid 5490 Burbidge has also been named after this revolutionary astrophysicist. Her recent accomplishments are the development of a faint object spectrograph in 1990 for the Hubble Space Telescope, and continued research of subjects such as intrinsic redshift. Also, she published Quasi-Stellar Objects, the first comprehensive work on quasi-stellar research.

Quasi-stellar objects have active galactic nuclei and are so distant that their stellar systems cannot be resolved. Quasistellar objects show broadened redshifted spectral lines and emit enormous amounts of radio energy. They are some of the most luminous objects in the universe. They have been discovered because of they are high redshift sources of electromagnetic energy.

	Works Cited
	"Margaret Burbidge Biography." Biography Base Home. Web. 12 May 2011. <http://www.biographybase.com/biography/Burbidge_Margaret.htmlhttp://physics.gmu.edu/~jevans/astr103/CourseNotes/ECText/Bios/burbidge.htm>.

Tenn, Joe. "The Bruce Medalists: Margaret Burbidge." SSU Department of Physics & Astronomy. JST. Web. 12 May 2011. <http://www.phys-astro.sonoma.edu/brucemedalists/burbidgem/>.