Eleanor Margaret Burbidge, FRS (née Peachey; 12 August 1919 – 5 April 2020) was a British-American observational astronomer and astrophysicist.

She returned to the UK in 1953, when Margaret and her husband Geoffrey Burbidge were invited to work with William Alfred Fowler and Fred Hoyle at the University of Cambridge.

Fowler was later awarded the 1983 Nobel Prize in Physics (shared with Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar) for his work on nucleosynthesis, and expressed surprise that Burbidge was not included.

[1] When the observatory's management found out, they eventually agreed that she could observe there, but only if she and her husband stayed in a separate self-catered cottage on the grounds, rather than the catered dormitory which had been designed for men only.

[5] In the 1960s and 1970s she measured the masses, compositions, and rotation curves of galaxies and performed early spectroscopic studies of quasars.

[11] Her discoveries in this area included QSO B1442+101 at a redshift of 3.5, making it the most distant known object at the time, a record which she held from 1974 to 1982.

Burbidge sometimes attributed this to sexism,[4] and at other times to politics intended to reduce the clout of the RGO director.

[15] Burbidge left the RGO in 1974, fifteen months after joining, due to controversy over moving the Isaac Newton Telescope from RGO headquarters at Herstmonceux Castle to Roque de los Muchachos Observatory in the Canary Islands.

[1] Her letter declining the prize caused the AAS to set up its first committee on the status of women in astronomy.

[16] During her term as president she convinced the members to ban AAS meetings in states which had not ratified the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution.

[16] At UCSD she helped develop the Faint Object Spectrograph for the Hubble Space Telescope, which launched in 1990.

[19] A few years after Margaret was born, Stanley obtained a patent related to the vulcanisation of rubber, which made enough money for the family to move to London in 1921 where he set up his own industrial chemistry laboratory.