posted 04-06-2020 02:33 PM               

Dr. Burbidge was the first woman to serve as director of the Royal Observatory, the storied British institution. She was also a contributor to the design of instruments carried aboard the Hubble Space Telescope and a recipient of the National Medal of Science, bestowed in 1985 by President Ronald Reagan.

...Dr. Burbidge had made her reputation by studying stars, often in collaboration with her husband, the astronomer Geoffrey Burbidge. Their research included a landmark article describing the formation within stars of nearly all the chemical elements — those incumbents of the periodic table that are the stuff of life in the universe.

She also studied the properties of galaxies and the nature of quasars and in later years came to question the Big Bang theory, the cornerstone of modern cosmology.

Her achievements were all the more noteworthy for having been made in a discipline that was a time-honored bastion of swaggering masculinity. It was a field in which, early in her career, she was denied access to the very instrument an observational astronomer needs most: a telescope.