Doodle honors Beatrice Tinsley, the woman who helped him understand the universe – Observer

Google celebrates this Wednesday through the usual Doodle, astronomer Beatrice Tinsley, who would 75 years if it were alive. In the main search engine page, the researcher is represented to observe the stars through a telescope.

Born in Chester, England, to January 27, 1941, Beatrice was the second of three sisters, having emigrated to New Zealand with his family after the Second World War. There he studied and married Brian Tinsley until, in 1963, the couple moved to Dallas, Texas

In 1974, Beatrice decided to emancipate:. Divorced her husband and left the filled home life the two adopted children to focus on career. He became an assistant professor at Yale University, where he remained until his death in 1981 with only 40 years, victim of cancer.

Beatrice Tinsley was an assistant at Yale University

However, and as pointed out by the British newspaper Independent, the career start was not easy, precisely because it is a married woman. Despite having been offered a scholarship at the Center for Advanced Studies of Texas, it was excluded from the permanent job. Already in New Zealand, when she married Brian, his colleague at the University of Christchurch, Beatrice could not get a job in the institution because her husband had been an employee at the same university.

Despite the difficulties, the scientist followed with investigations and helped to unlock the past and future of the universe. Beatrice noticed that as galaxies are composed of billions of stars, could use what was already known about the life of the stars to calculate what would be the evolution of the different galaxies. Discovering how each galaxy had formed their stars, Beatrice foresaw how it would evolve over time. From here, Tinsley calculated by models for different types of galaxies. Small detail: all this was done at a time when computers could not run algorithms

The research Tinsley was also an important tool to change the traditional method with that determined the distance to distant galaxies.. This also influenced the calculation to arrive at the actual size of the universe and its growth rate, explains the Independent. All this led to the formation of the main theories that are behind the origin of the universe, the so-called Big Bang.

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