@minouette@spore.social
Happy birthday to British-born, American Margaret Burbidge (1919-2020) who was one of the people instrumental in building our understanding of stellar nucleosynthesis, how nuclei are produced in stars & you and I are all stardust! She was the 1st author of a monumental scientific paper Synthesis of the Elements in Stars, which became known as B2FH from the initials of its authors: Margaret Burbidge, Geoffrey Burbidge (her 
husband), William A. Fowler & Fred Hoyle. The paper, one of the most-influential in & nuclear , reviewed everything then known about stellar nucleosynthesis, backed it up with astronomical & lab data & further explained how elements heavier than iron are made & the abundances of the various elements. Elements up to iron can be built up by nuclear fusion in stars & B2FH also explained how heavier elements are made. At the base of my print is a stellar absorption spectrum of
the sort she gathered & used in B2FH & a cross-section of a supergiant star & how nucleosynthesis leads to a nested series of shells where increasingly heavy elements are burned as fuel producing new elements through fusion. The shells from outermost in are: hydrogen (H), helium (He), carbon (C), neon (Ne), oxygen (O), silicon (Si) & iron (Fe).
In the ‘60s & ‘70s she worked on galaxies & quasars, finding the most distant object then known.
In the ‘80s & ‘90s she worked on the development & use of the Faint Object Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope. She fought against discrimination against women in astronomy, while rejecting positive discrimination. Burbidge was director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, president of the Am Astro Soc & AAAS & worked at U London, U Chicago, Cambridge, CIT, & UCSD
