E. Margaret Burbidge

E. Margaret Burbidge helped connect observed stellar elemental abundances with stellar nucleosynthesis in the 1957 synthesis written with G. R. Burbidge, William Alfred Fowler and Fred Hoyle. Their account combined stellar burning stages and nuclear reactions into an explanation of how stars build many chemical elements.^[ref]

The abundance pattern acts as a physical constraint: a proposed nuclear reaction sequence must account for relative yields, rather than merely produce an element in principle.