Margaret Burbidge
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Margaret Burbidge (nee Eleanor Margaret Peachey) (born August 12, 1919) is an British 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 1979-1988 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 and also helped develop instruments for the Hubble Space Telescope. Currently, she is a professor emeritus of physics at UCSD and continues to be active in research.
After her PhD at London Observatory in 1947, in the early 1950s Margaret Burbidge did research in collaboration with her husband Geoffrey Burbidge (a theoretical astrophysicist), Fred Hoyle, and William Alfred Fowler, that in 1957 showed the famous result that all of the elements except the very lightest are produced by nuclear processes inside stars. In her later research she was one of the first to measure the rotation curves of galaxies and to measure their masses and was one of the pioneers of the study of quasars.
Among the prizes she has won are: with her husband, the Helen B. Warner Prize for Astronomy in 1959; the Henry Norris Russell Lectureship in 1984; and the Catherine Wolfe Bruce medal of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific in 1982.
Burbidge was turned down for a Carnegie Fellowship in 1947 because this fellowship would have meant that she would have had to observe at Mount Wilson observatory, which was reserved for men only at that time (she later used these telescopes by applying for observing time using her husband's Geoffrey Burbidge's name and formally accompanying him onto the mountain). Her directorship of the Royal Greenwich Observatory was the first time in 300 years that that directorship was not associated with the post of the Astronomer Royal, which was given to radio astronomer and later Nobel prize winner Martin Ryle instead. Experiences such as these turned Burbidge into one of the foremost and most influential personalities in the fight to end the discrimination of women in Astronomy. Consequently, in 1972 she turned down the Annie J. Cannon Prize for Astronomy 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 1983 she was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, she was also vice-president and president of the American Astronomical Society.
In 1985 she was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Reagan to acknowledge her scientific accomplishments.
The asteroid 5490 Burbidge is named after her.
External links
- Autobiography in 1994 Annual Review of Astronomy and Astrophysics (http://adsbit.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_query?bibcode=1994ARA%26A..32....1B)
- Biography from the George Mason University (http://www.physics.gmu.edu/classinfo/astr103/CourseNotes/ECText/Bios/burbidge.htm)
- Biography from the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (http://www.phys-astro.sonoma.edu/BruceMedalists/BurbidgeM/)
- Article from the UCSD Times (http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/publications/times/TimesV15n4.htm)
- short biography (http://cannon.sfsu.edu/~gmarcy/cswa/history/burbidge.html)
- personal web page (http://casswww.ucsd.edu/personal/mburbidge.html)
- personal web page at UCSD physics (http://www-physics.ucsd.edu/was-sdphul/dept/pr/faculty/fac_htmls/mb.html)sl:Eleanor Margaret Peachey Burbidge