Элеонора Бёрбидж: Астрофизик және әйелдер теңдігі үшін күрескен ғалым

British born American astrophysicist

Eleanor Margaret Burbidge, FRS (; 12 August 1919 – 5 April 2020) was a British American observational astronomer and astrophysicist. In the 1950s, she was one of the founders of stellar nucleosynthesis and was first author of the influential B2FH paper. During the 1960s and 1970s she worked on galaxy rotation curves and quasars, discovering the most distant astronomical object then known. In the 1980s and 1990s she helped develop and utilise the Faint Object Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope. Burbidge was also well known for her work opposing discrimination against women in astronomy. Burbidge held several leadership and administrative posts, including director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory (1973–1975), president of the American Astronomical Society (1976–1978), and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1983). Burbidge worked at the University of London Observatory, Yerkes Observatory of the University of Chicago, the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge, the California Institute of Technology, and the University of California San Diego (UCSD). From 1979 to 1988 she was the first director of the Center for Astronomy and Space Sciences at UCSD, where she worked from 1962 until her retirement.

Burbidge studied at University College London (UCL), where she received an undergraduate degree in 1939 and a Ph. D. in 1943. Shortly after the war, she taught astronomy at ULO to undergraduate students from across the University of London system, including Arthur C. Clarke who was then an undergraduate at King's College London. Her research during this period focused on the abundances of chemical elements in stars. She returned to the UK in 1953, when Margaret and her husband Geoffrey Burbidge were invited to work with William Alfred Fowler and Fred Hoyle at the University of Cambridge. culminating in a magnum opus in 1957, now known as the B2FH paper after the initials of Burbidge, Burbidge, Fowler & Hoyle. Margaret Burbidge was the first author of the paper, which was written while she was pregnant. The paper demonstrated that most heavier chemical elements were formed in stellar evolution. The theory they developed remains the fundamental basis for stellar nucleosynthesis. Fowler was later awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar) for his work on nucleosynthesis, and expressed surprise that Burbidge was not included. She was a supporter of the steady state theory of cosmology, but her own work on quasars helped to support the alternative Big Bang theory. For 300 years the post had always been held by the Astronomer Royal, but when Burbidge was appointed to the RGO directorship the posts were split, with radio astronomer Martin Ryle appointed as Astronomer Royal. Burbidge sometimes attributed this to sexism, Burbidge left the RGO in 1974, fifteen months after joining, due to controversy over moving the Isaac Newton Telescope from RGO headquarters at Herstmonceux Castle to Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in the Canary Islands. Her letter declining the prize caused the AAS to set up its first committee on the status of women in astronomy. During her term as president she convinced the members to ban AAS meetings in states which had not ratified the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution. From 1979 to 1988, she served as the first director of the UCSD's Center for Astrophysics and Space Science. She was the daughter of Marjorie Stott Peachey and Stanley John Peachey; her father was a lecturer in chemistry at the Manchester School of Technology (now part of the University of Manchester) and her mother was one of his students. Margaret Burbidge died on 5 April 2020, in San Francisco at age 100 after a fall.