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
Big Bang nucleosynthesis conditions. The denser the initial universe was, the more deuterium would be converted to helium-4 before time ran out, and the less deuterium would remain. There are no known post-Big Bang processes which can produce significant amounts of deuterium. Hence observations about deuterium abundance suggest that the universe is not infinitely old, which is in accordance with the Big Bang theory. During the 1970s, there were major efforts to find processes that could produce deuterium, but those revealed ways of producing isotopes other than deuterium. The problem was that while the concentration of deuterium in the universe is consistent with