MONDAY 19 AUGUST 2019A STAR AMONG US
Andreea Font hails Margaret Burbidge, a pioneer for women in
astronomy who conducted groundbreaking work on elements and
galaxies – and campaigned for equality
Burbidge in 1971: she turned 100 earlier this month (Getty)
As Carl Sagan famously said: “The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff.” That’s not just a poetic
bromide – there’s solid scientific proof that the calcium in our bones, the iron in our blood and the copper
in our hair were all made in furnaces within stars. Astronomer Margaret Burbidge laid out the evidence for
this in a 100-page paper in 1957. Her work, alongside Geoffrey Burbidge, William Fowler and Fred Hoyle,
forever changed the way humans think of themselves and their place in the universe.
Apart from her groundbreaking work on the origin of elements, Burbidge is interested in galaxies,
extremely distant and luminous cosmic objects that harbour supermassive black holes called quasars, and in