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
Steady state model Big Bang theory predicted as much, the steady state model predicted that such objects would be found throughout the universe, including close to our own galaxy. By 1961, statistical tests based on radio-source surveys had ruled out the steady state model in the minds of most cosmologists, although some proponents of the steady state insisted that the radio data were suspect. For most cosmologists, the definitive refutation of the steady state model came with the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation in 1964, which was predicted by the Big Bang theory. The steady state model explained microwave background radiation