Sky & Telescope - July 2019 - 65

From a historical perspective, that Hoyle and Geoff
remained stubborn adherents to Steady State cosmology
- long after the consensus deemed it had been disproved -
somewhat overshadowed the light they both illuminated on
numerous scientiﬁc mysteries throughout their careers. The
memory of Burbidge's contributions to astronomy, in contrast, remains unfettered by the controversy.
Cleverly, she rarely offered her opinion publicly on theoretical matters, either leaving Geoff to slug it out or, if he
were absent, astutely contributing to the debate by starting
her argument with: "If Geoff were here, he would say . . . "
Sarah feels the reason for this was simple: She was never a
theoretician. "I don't think Mum ever worried about where
Fred's theories might lead," she says. "Remember that she
was an observational astronomer, focused on her observations and reducing spectra."

A New Astronomical Mystery

SA R A H BURBIDG E (2)

Having wielded these formidable observational skills in B2FH,
Burbidge needed a new scientiﬁc mystery to get her teeth into.
After 10 years working with Geoff measuring the rotation of
stars and gas in disk galaxies and studying peculiar galaxies and galaxy clusters, she eventually found it in the newly
discovered puzzling objects we now call quasars - or, as they
were termed at the time, quasi-stellar objects.
The ﬁrst positively identiﬁed quasar to be observed and
identiﬁed as such, 3C 273, caused a tremendous commotion in the astronomical community in 1963. Barring any
new physics, it was shining 40 times more brightly than the
brightest known galaxies. Plus it had a redshift - meaning its
light is shifted toward the red end of the spectrum because of
its motion away from the viewer - that placed it far beyond
our own galaxy, around 2.5 billion light-years away.
With only a few telescopes around the world that could
obtain spectra of quasars, Burbidge was ideally placed to join
the race to ﬁnd more quasars with even bigger redshifts, given
her access to the Shane 3-meter (120-inch) telescope at Lick
Observatory. This she did - with a reputation as "a rather
formidable driver," she would quite literally speed to the
observatory in their Jaguar. She discovered tens of examples,
including OQ 172 at redshift 3.53 in 1973, a quasar that
remained the farthest known for
nearly a decade.
Though fascinating, quasars presented a problem for
t COLD NIGHTS IN THE CAGE
An overhead photo taken around 1970
shows Burbidge sitting in the "cage"
of the Shane 3-meter (120-inch) telescope at Lick Observatory owned and
operated by the University of California. Nowadays, observers operate
telescopes from comfortably heated
control rooms, sometimes miles away
from the actual dome.

p THE JAGUAR Margaret still owns the 1961 Jaguar Mark II, shown
here behind the Burbidges. Although she doesn't drive it anymore, she
loves being driven around by Sarah and her grandson, Connor.

Hoyle, Geoff, and their dwindling band of fellow Steady
State universe supporters. Unless some new physics peculiar
to quasars could be mustered or observations of blueshifted
quasars made, these redshifts were cosmological, indicating that the universe is expanding everywhere and that this
expansion had to come from the Big Bang. As it became clear
that neither of these would be forthcoming, Burbidge's quasar
observations turned out to be yet another nail in the cofﬁn
of the Steady State universe. However, Burbidge herself never
saw it that way, keeping "an open mind always."
The latter years of Burbidge's scientiﬁc career were spent
probing the spectra of galaxies, determining galaxies' rotations, masses, and chemical composition, and, of course,
investigating quasars. She also played a major role in moving observational spectroscopy into the heavens, helping to
develop the Faint Object Spectrograph (FOS) aboard the Hubble Space Telescope. The FOS was one of the original Hubble
instruments, designed to detect the physical state and chemical composition of very faint objects such as quasars. Her
last major scientiﬁc contribution was leading the FOS data
analysis team. Among other ﬁndings, this team provided evidence for the presence of a massive black hole at the center of
nearby elliptical galaxy M87 (see page 10 for more on M87).
As Hubble's FOS was churning out new astronomical
insights in 1995, Fowler died. Hoyle followed in 2001, with
Geoff sadly passing away in 2010 at the age of 84. As a result,
for almost a decade Margaret has remained the sole living
member of B2FH. On the eve of her 100th birthday, it's a
good time to reﬂect on and applaud what she and the other
members of B2FH achieved, as well as all the triumphs she
can rightly claim are hers alone.
"You've made me look back over her 100 years - starting
with observations from that little telescope in Mill Hill in
the 1940s all the way to the development of the Faint Object
Spectrograph on the Hubble Space Telescope - and it is really
quite remarkable," reﬂects Sarah. "She simply wanted to be
very good at her work as an observational astronomer, and I
would say she was probably the best of her generation."

¢ BENJAMIN SKUSE is a science writer based in Somerset,
United Kingdom.
s k y a n d t e l e s c o p e . c o m * J U LY 2 0 1 9

http://www.skyandtelescope.com

Sky & Telescope - July 2019

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