Trailblazing astronomer, E. Margaret Burbidge died at her San Francisco home on Sunday a few months shy of her 101st birthday. She is remembered not only as a women who wouldn’t take no for an answer when she was denied access to telescopes but for her contributions to the understanding of the origin of the elements that make up everything.

Carl Sagan famously said “We are made of star-stuff”

Margaret along with fellow astrophysicist husband Geoffrey, American physicist William Fowler and British astronomer Fred Hoyle​​​ published Synthesis of the Elements in Stars published in 1957. The paper , which describes how elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are forged within stars, is so well known astrometry refer to it by its authors initials, B2FH.

Sagan later described its findings as, “all of the rocky material we stand on, the iron in our blood, the calcium in our teeth, were produced billions of years ago in the interior of a red giant star.”

In the 1980s Margaret Burbidge served as director of the University of California San Diego’s Center for Astrophysics and Space Sciences, where she helped develop instruments for the Hubble Space Telescope.

She was the first female member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. She was also the first female president of the American Astronomical Society (AAS). She was the woman to serve as the director of the Royal Greenwich Observatory, but denied the customary title “Astronomer Royal” because of her sex.

Burbidge was committed to ensuring opportunities for women in science, not just in words. She shocked professional astronomers when she refused the American Astronomical Society (AAS) Annie J. Cannon Prize, because though the society’s oldest award, only women were considered.

Burbidge wrote “I believe that it is high time that discrimination in favor of, as well as against women in professional life be removed”, adding “It would be interesting to know, however, how often our names have been excluded from consideration for professorships, directorships . . . because we are women.”

She was named AAS President four years later.

Burbidge also made pioneering measurement of the masses of galaxies. She also held the record for discovering the most distant object, a quasar more than 19 billion light years away.