Geoffrey Burbidge British astronomer Fred Hoyle, he and his wife were co-authors of "Synthesis of the Elements in Stars", a fundamental paper on stellar nucleosynthesis published in 1957. It is commonly referred to as the BFH paper after the initials of the surnames of the four authors. This paper describes the process of stars burning lighter elements into successively heavier atoms which then are expelled to form other structures in the universe, including other stars and planets. In recent years Burbidge was known mostly for his alternative cosmology "quasi-steady state theory", which contradicts the Big Bang theory. According to Burbidge, the universe
Ultimate fate of the universe with galaxies and eventually (in a finite time) all forms, no matter how small, will disintegrate into unbound elementary particles and radiation, ripped apart by the phantom energy force and shooting apart from each other. The end state of the universe is a singularity, as the dark energy density and expansion rate becomes infinite. The Big Crunch hypothesis is a symmetric view of the ultimate fate of the universe. Just as the Big Bang started as a cosmological expansion, this theory assumes that the average density of the universe will be enough to stop its expansion and begin contracting. The