After decades of scanning the sky to observe the stars, astronomer Eleanor Margaret Burbidge was thrilled to finally glimpse a mysterious deep-space object she never thought she’d see in her lifetime. On October 28, 1990, she viewed on a computer screen at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center the first image of a targeted quasar billions of light years from Earth. Quasar UM675, as it was called, appeared to behave like a star while sending out powerful, eruptive radio waves. What was this strange quasi-stellar radio source six million times fainter in appearance than a bright star that seemed to be speeding 150,000 miles per second away from Earth?
Nobody knew for certain. Margaret, as she was called, said that quasars were “real brain teasers” and referred to them as possibly “a new class of objects.” “We’ve been waiting a long time,” said Margaret, a self-described quasar hunter since they were first discovered in the 1960s.
What gave Margaret special satisfaction was that this quasar image had been successfully captured with equipment created under her leadership. The faint object spectrograph (FOS) was developed by her team of scientists at the Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences at the University of California, San Diego. The FOS observes very faint objects in both visible and near ultraviolet regions of the spectrum. This was part of a complement of dedicated scientific instruments incorporated in the Hubble Space Telescope, which had been launched seven months earlier. Orbiting 375 miles above the Earth’s atmosphere, the Hubble is the ultimate “clear skies” telescope—the kind that Margaret had yearned for throughout her long and remarkable career.
Margaret Burbidge in 1980 viewing slides of galaxies and stars at an American Astronomical Society meeting. She was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that same year.
Her path to becoming one of the foremost astronomers in the world was not easy. During the early decades of her 70-year career, the field of astrophysics was dominated by men who controlled access to the most modern and powerful telescopes. As late as the mid-1960s institutions such as Mount Wilson Observatory in the mountains above Pasadena, California, and Palomar Observatory operated by California Institute of Technology in north San Diego County, California, refused women access to telescopes. The reason? The living quarters were purposefully designed to be a place “where male astronomers would not be bothered by their wives or families.” Women astronomers also experienced systematic exclusion until the mid-1960s by the Carnegie Fellowships, the only funding available for study at Mount Wilson and Palomar. Like so many women astronomers, Margaret struggled to obtain research funding, professional recognition, promotions, and secure teaching positions.
Flexibility, stamina, and resilience were key to Margaret’s success. “If frustrated in one’s endeavor by a stone wall or any kind of blockage,” she said, “one must find a way around—another route toward one’s goal.” This was advice she shared with countless young women scientists she mentored and inspired.
Born August 12, 1919, in Davenport, England, Margaret was the elder in a family of two girls. She grew up in a comfortable home in London near a huge park called Hampstead Heath. She and her sister enjoyed the attention of two maids and a nanny. They had dancing lessons, summer vacations in France, and plenty of books—ranging from The World Book of Science to Treasure Island, which she recalled made her “deliciously terrified.”
Both of Margaret’s parents were scientifically talented. Her father, Stanley, a chemistry professor nicknamed Old Peach Blossom by his students, became a successful research chemist and wealthy patent inventor. The family’s wealth came from his process for creating vulcanized or hardened rubber.
Margaret’s mother, Marjorie, had been one of Old Peach Blossom’s students at the Manchester School of Technology. Seventeen years his junior, she was one of only a few women undergraduates. Marjorie’s determination and her fascination with the flowers, plants, and trees of the natural world had profound impacts on Margaret. It was her mother who held four-year-old Margaret up to the porthole during a night crossing of the English Channel to distract her from seasickness by showing her the clear night sky. Margaret had never seen so many glittering stars. Her awe and wonder that August 1923 evening stayed with her all her life.
Her mother inspired Margaret in other ways as well. She encouraged Margaret and her sister to earn their own living “and not just be housewives,” Margaret later recalled. This was unheard-of advice at a time when upper-middle-class women were told to marry well and not bother with college or a career.
Margaret’s father gave her a pair of binoculars to view the night sky, a microscope, and (of course) a chemistry set. She became a passionate tree-climber. Fearlessness in scaling heights would serve her well later when she had to scale platforms to position telescope sights. Although she was bright and learned to read early, she was shy and hated school. What she loved were numbers—the bigger the better. She’d write a number with 120 zeros on a piece of paper and stare at it with what she called “enormous fascination.” Passionate curiosity about mathematics would later drive her desire to know about the distances between stars, the vastness of deep space, and the origins of the universe.
Margaret attended an all-girls private prep school in London, where science equipment was limited but much emphasis was given to mathematics. While the school was strict, there was, she said, “no ban on nonconformity.” Girls were never told they could not be scientists. An especially influential teacher inspired Margaret to work independently on physics experiments using a college textbook.
By the time she was 17, Margaret had already passed the necessary exams for college. That year marked the death of her father, who had long been an invalid. Enough money had been set aside for Margaret to attend whatever college she wanted. In 1936, she entered the University College of London, where she majored in astronomy and minored in mathematics. On the college grounds stood two small telescopes that provided her with her first real glimpse of distant stars on the rare nights that London skies were not cloudy or smoggy. Her experience with these telescopes inspired her to try to determine “the distance of as many stars as possible.”
Margaret graduated from college in 1939, just as war erupted between Great Britain and Nazi Germany. “The world,” she later said, “seemed to be turning upside down.” With so many men enlisting in the army, jobs related to astronomy opened up for women for the first time. In 1940, she was hired northwest of London to maintain a 24-inch telescope and provide mathematical calculations that analyzed Allied bombing surveys.
German nighttime bombing of British cities, called the Blitz, created nightmarish dangers for civilians from September 1940 to May 1941. More than a million homes were destroyed, and 40,000 civilians were killed, half of them in London. During the Blitz air-raid alerts, people hid in the subway and in special bomb shelters. To confuse Nazi pilots, blackout rules were strictly enforced in London and elsewhere. Windows were covered and outside lights were extinguished.
An unintended benefit of the blackouts was vastly improved telescope viewing. On nights when there was no bombing, Margaret stood or perched on a ladder in the enormous dome that covered the Wilson telescope and carefully studied the night sky. “While sitting on the observing ladder, I used to picture the star, its surface seething with turbulent outflowing gas.” She imagined the stellar gravity, the rotation. “I used to picture those photons traveling through space and time, waiting for me or someone cleverer than me to make sense of the physics of the processes in the outer layer.”
This stunning 2001 image from the Hubble Space Telescope revealed the heart of the Whirlpool Galaxy, the birth site of massive and luminous stars.
This thrilling experience fulfilled her early dreams and set up a pattern for the rest of her career. “I have never tired of the joy of looking through the slit in the darkened dome and watching the stars,” she later wrote.
As her research deepened, Margaret became fascinated by the origin of stars. Little was known about what they were made of and how chemicals reacted inside them. Like so many women scientists after World War II ended, Margaret lost her job in 1945 to a returning veteran. Unemployed, she decided to finish her Ph.D. Her goal was to find a place to work where she would have access to larger telescopes, better instruments, and the benefit of clearer skies. She wanted to go somewhere far from London, which had been badly damaged by bombs and was devastated economically.
Why not the United States? Eagerly, she applied for a Carnegie Fellowship that was supposed to fund young astronomers’ use of telescopes at Mount Wilson Observatory. To her shock and dismay, she was told only men could use this high-tech telescope. Women were barred from Carnegie Fellowships, the rejection letter said. This was the first time she’d experienced discrimination because she was a woman.
Now what? She had to find another way.
During a graduate course in physics in 1947, tall, soft-spoken, ladylike Margaret met outspoken Geoffrey Burbidge, whom she called Geoff. He was described as “a large man with an even larger voice.” His background was very different from hers. He was an only child born in 1925 in the Cotswold Hills between Oxford and Stratford-on-Avon. His father was a builder and his mother was a milliner.
Geoff was the first in his family to go beyond grammar school. He eventually received his Ph.D. in theoretical physics in 1951. His connection with Margaret changed his career ideas completely. After their marriage in 1948, he joined her on observing trips as her assistant. The physics of stars had always fascinated him. Later, he joked that he became an astronomer by marrying one.
Margaret changed her last name when she married Geoff, becoming E. Margaret Burbidge. She and her husband formed a research team dubbed B2 or B squared by their associates. Their work together—he did the theorizing, she did the observations—lasted more than 60 years, until his death in 2010 at age 84.
During their early years they led a nomadic existence, often surviving on minimal money, traveling as cheaply as possible, and living in college dormitories and wherever they could find affordable housing. They faced challenges securing access to the best telescopes and equipment, suitable academic and research jobs, and positions in the same city—sometimes even the same country. They traveled back and forth across the Atlantic, from England to the United States, and crisscrossed the American continent—a situation that caused them to delay starting a family.
Margaret made her first trip to the United States in 1950 with a grant to do research at the University of Chicago’s Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay, Wisconsin, where women were not restricted from using the 40-inch refractor telescope. While Geoff worked at Harvard Research Observatory, she took the train from New York to Chicago and then on to Wisconsin. She said, “It was like entering a new world—literally a time of expanding horizons in all directions, physically, mentally, and spiritually.”
Margaret focused her research on a specific group of stars called B stars. Soon her interests expanded to include understanding the structure of galaxies, what she called “the building blocks of the universe.” She also spent time in the University of Chicago’s sister observatory, McDonald Observatory, in Fort Davis, Texas.
In 1953, Margaret and her husband decided to investigate how chemical elements inside stars are created. Fred Hoyle of Cambridge University, a famous astronomer who was their friend, proposed that elements are constantly being created inside stars in a series of thermonuclear reactions. Nuclear physicist William Fowler from the California Institute of Technology joined the team. They worked together for the next four years to show how powerful, often violent reactions inside stars may have created elements that make up the universe: simple elements like pure hydrogen, helium, and lithium and elements like oxygen, iron, and the carbon-based building blocks of life as we know it.
The best place to collect data was Mount Wilson Observatory in California, where women were still forbidden to use the telescope. Undaunted, Margaret was determined to gain access. In order to do the necessary observations and collect data, she posed as her husband’s assistant. She had to work around all kinds of barriers that limited her observation time with the powerful telescopes and the sophisticated spectrograph, which recorded images of targeted stars. These images provided key clues about the stars’ age and chemical makeup based on perceived color.
Margaret spent long winter nights in 1955 in the unheated observatory. She maneuvered the heavy ladder to reposition the telescope so that she could follow the targeted star as it appeared to move through the night. Mount Wilson rules made her work even more difficult. She and Geoff were not allowed to use the institution’s only truck for transport up and down the mountain. She was forbidden to use the bathroom. (“Sorry, men only.”) She and her husband could not eat in the dining hall and were told they had to live halfway down the mountain in a small, unheated summer cottage with no hot water.
Pregnant with their first child and worried that this would only be one more reason to forbid her access to badly needed observation data, Margaret tried to conceal her condition by wearing large, loose, warm clothing. By April 1956, however, she had trouble scrambling up and down and heaving the ladder around the platform. Her daughter, Sarah, was born in late 1956.
37-year-old Margaret continued to work on the data while her daughter was a newborn. A graduate student helped babysit. Margaret assisted in writing and editing her team’s final 40-page report, “Synthesis of the Elements in Stars.” Their theory came to be known as the B2FH theory from the first letters of its creators’ names (Burbidge squared, Fowler, and Hoyle). Their findings rocked the scientific community when the article was published in 1957. The teamwork and research were among her most memorable accomplishments, she later said.
Their work showed in detail how different elements were produced by stars at different stages, providing a new view of the galaxy as “a dynamic evolving organism, of stars that were an interacting community.” Margaret and Geoff won the American Astronomical Society’s Helen Warner Prize in 1959. Fowler was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1983 for his work on stellar nucleosynthesis.
In 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope and Margaret Burbidge’s Faint Object Spectrographic Investigation Team recorded this unprecedented, detailed view of highly energetic events in the core of a galaxy 30 million light-years away.
In spite of their stunning success, Margaret still had trouble finding steady academic work with equitable pay. When the University of Chicago offered Geoff a job as associate professor, Margaret was told she could not be hired because of nepotism rules. Instead, she was offered an underpaid research fellowship. When the University of California set up a San Diego campus, she and Geoff jumped at the chance to go to this campus in 1962. Margaret was finally given a full professorship in 1964. She was 45 years old.
In 1971, her life changed again when she was offered the job of director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, Great Britain’s most famous observatory. She and her husband and 16-year-old Sarah left California in mid-1972 on a “leave of absence” in case they wanted to return. Margaret had suspicions and misgivings about the new job. No woman had ever been given the title of director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, which is housed in a castle complete with a lush garden, a moat, and a pond full of swans. In past years this job had gone hand in hand with the title Chief Astronomer of England. This key role was, however, given to a man.
After being refused access to high-powered telescopes at Mount Wilson in California, Margaret Burbidge was able in 1951 to utilize the telescope at Yerkes Observatory, Williams Bay, WI, operated by the University of Chicago.
To make matters worse, the observatory was in the throes of a battle between young astronomers and the old guard. A dispute raged about what to do about moving a telescope out of England, where observations were possible only 600 to 800 hours per year because of foul, foggy weather. (By contrast, the best viewing sites in the world ensure the telescope could be used 2,000 hours per year.)
After 15 months of strife, Margaret decided to resign and return to the United States to do what she loved most: research and observation with telescopes. She went back to California, where she filed for United States citizenship in 1977. She and Geoff returned to their jobs at the University of California, San Diego. She became very involved in promoting women’s careers in science. She was elected the first woman president of the American Astronomical Society, 1976–1978, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1983. In 1982 she was the Bruce Medalist, and in 1983 she won the National Science Foundation National Medal of Science.
Geoff, who had served as director of Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona from 1978 to 1984, died in 2010 at age 84 after a long illness.
Throughout her remarkable career, Margaret Burbidge remained a pioneer in her field. For many, she has been the quintessential role model for women in science. As Annella Sargent, a professor at Cal Tech, said, “She showed me early in my career that a woman could be an eminent scientist, have a successful family life, and accomplish all these things with grace and style.”
Margaret Burbidge displays a photograph of a model of a telescope.
