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 universe as modeled by Einstein (1917) was unstable and contradicted general relativity. The modern Big Bang theory is one in which the universe has a finite age and has evolved over time through cooling, expansion, and the formation of structures through gravitational collapse. The steady state model asserts that although the universe is expanding, it nevertheless does not change its appearance over time (the perfect cosmological principle); the universe has no beginning and no end. This requires that matter be continually created in order to keep the universe's density from decreasing. Influential papers on steady state cosmologies were published by