In 2016, astronomer Vera C. Rubin died at the age of 88. Three years later, Congress designated the NSF-DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile in her honor. The telescope at the observatory will have the largest digital camera yet and is expected to go online in 2025. The camera will snap constant pictures for the next 10 years as part of a mapping project that will capture the changing sky.
Shooting stars, supernovas, meteors, and comets will all be caught on camera. But the observatory will also tell us more about what we can’t see — dark matter.
“Scientists knew about the existence of dark matter, but Rubin’s observation helped make sense of it,” says Bryan J. Field, a theoretical physicist and program manager for Cosmic Frontiers in the Office of High-Energy Physics at the Department of Energy.
Vera Rubin’s Quest for Dark Matter
Rubin first began dark matter observations in 1963, and she soon left teaching so she could focus full-time on her research. In 1965, she began working for the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism within the Carnegie Institution of Washington (Now Carnegie Science). She was the first female scientist on staff at the institute.
There, she met Kent Ford, who designed telescopes and other instruments. Rubin and Ford published their first paper together in 1965. Between 1976 and 1986, the two would publish 35 papers in The Astrophysical Journal and 11 in The Astronomical Journal.
Rubin and Ford were trying to determine within a galaxy how stars and gas clouds revolved around the center. In her research, Rubin saw evidence that invisible matter existed in far greater quantities than ordinary matter.
Rubin and Ford analyzed data from 60 galaxies. They found that within the galaxies, stars at the outer edge moved at a similar pace as those closer to the center. This didn’t add up with what physicists expected. This meant there had to be some sort of invisible mass within these galaxies.
Rubin wasn’t the first scientist to theorize about dark matter. In the early 1930s, another scientist suggested the movement of galaxies within their clusters needed a greater explanation. It was a question that dangled for more than three decades. However, it was Rubin’s work that helped explain dark matter to the scientific community.
“It’s hard to describe how revolutionary it was at the time,” Field says. “These were heady days for astronomy. We were still trying to figure out how stars shine.”
Rubin’s journal articles brought her data to the scientific community and supplied badly needed answers.
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Vera Rubin’s Journey
Prior to her research, Rubin was born in Philadelphia in 1928. Her father was an engineer who helped her build a telescope. Her mother was a homemaker who recognized her daughter’s quest for knowledge and wrote a note to the local librarian stating that Rubin was permitted to borrow books from the adult section.
In high school, Rubin was ignored by a physics teacher who seemed surprised that girls were allowed to enroll in his class. When Rubin shared her happy news that she had been accepted to Vassar College with a scholarship, he told her she’d do fine “…as long as you stay away from science.”
After she was accepted to Vassar College, Rubin took astronomy courses and worked as an assistant to the astronomy professor. During the summers, she worked at the Naval Research Laboratory. She graduated a year early in 1948, married, and then began graduate school at Cornell University, where her husband was studying for his doctorate in chemistry.
After earning her master’s degree in 1951, Rubin was a young mother living in suburban Washington D.C. She read The Astrophysical Journal (where she would later be published) while her son played in the sandbox and decided to take her studies further. She attended Georgetown University for her Ph.D. in astronomy. When she graduated in 1954, her husband and children were in attendance. Rubin began teaching at the university after graduation.
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Remembering an ‘Unstoppable Warrior”
As Rubin’s reputation grew, she earned accolades. She was the second female astronomer elected to the National Academy of Sciences and was awarded the U.S. National Medal of Science in 1993.
Rubin used her status to advocate for others, particularly women in the sciences who were barred admission from graduate programs, employment opportunities, and professional organizations.
When she passed away, Congress made note of both Rubin’s accomplishments and also her obstacles. In a remembrance shortly after her death, the president of Carnegie Science called Rubin “an unstoppable warrior.” He reflected on the fact that she was initially refused at the Palomar Observatory because she was a woman and stated it would have been a “tremendous loss” if she had listened to those who sought to limit her.
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Emilie Lucchesi has written for some of the country’s largest newspapers, including The New York Times, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times. She holds a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Missouri and an MA from DePaul University. She also holds a Ph.D. in communication from the University of Illinois-Chicago with an emphasis on media framing, message construction and stigma communication. Emilie has authored three nonfiction books. Her third, A Light in the Dark: Surviving More Than Ted Bundy, releases October 3, 2023, from Chicago Review Press and is co-authored with survivor Kathy Kleiner Rubin.
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