Margaret Burbidge - Scientific Achievements

Scientific Achievements

After receiving her Ph.D. 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 B2FH 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 is a professor emeritus of physics at UCSD and continues to be active in research, such as engaging in non-standard cosmologies such as, intrinsic redshift.

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