



E. Margaret Burbidge, an astrophysicist who made pathbreaking findings about the state of the cosmos, not the least of which was discovering precisely what it entailed to succeed as a woman in a male-dominated universe at midcentury, died on Sunday at her home in San Francisco. She was 100.

Her daughter, Sarah Burbidge, said the cause was complications from a fall.

A native of England who worked largely in the United States, Dr. Burbidge built a career that was stellar in both senses. She was considered one of the foremost astronomers in the world, long regarded as a trailblazer for women in the field.

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.

“She has a huge imprint on the history of modern astronomy and cosmology and nuclear astrophysics,” George Fuller, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of California, San Diego, where Dr. Burbidge taught for many years, said in an interview for this obituary in 2017.