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
History of the Big Bang theory from a hot dense state. Objects such as quasars and radio galaxies were observed to be much more common at large distances (therefore in the distant past) than in the nearby universe, whereas the Steady State predicted that the average properties of the universe should be unchanging with time. In addition, the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964 was considered the death knell of the Steady State, although this prediction was only qualitative, and failed to predict the exact temperature of the CMB. (The key big bang prediction is the black-body spectrum of the CMB, which was