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Google Doodle is celebrating the life of Dilhan Eryurt with a cartoon of the late Turkish astrophysicist.

The picture sees Eryurt, who died in 2012, staring at stars and planets, the origins of which she helped uncover for Nasa in the 1960s.

Born in western Turkey in 1926, Eryurt graduated with a degree in mathematics and astrophysics from Istanbul University shortly after the end of the Second World War, before moving to Canada in 1959 to work for the International Atomic Energy Agency.

She began working at Nasa in Washington DC two years later and stayed for 12 years, reportedly as the only female astronomer at the space agency for much of the time.

Collaborating with one of the founders of nuclear astrophysics, Alastair GW Cameron, Eryurt worked on the evolution of stars, particularly the necessary conditions required for the formation of one.