Vera Rubin, scientist who confirmed existence of dark matter, dead at 88

Ground-breaking astrophysicist Vera Rubin, who helped to confirm the existence of dark matter, died on Sunday at the age of 88, according to the Carnegie Institute.

Rubin was a revolutionary force not just for her astrophysics research, but also for being a trailblazing woman in the male-dominated sciences.

In the 1960s and 1970s, Rubin was collaborating with astronomer Kent Ford, investigating the behavior of spiral galaxies, when they uncovered something unexpected: The stars at the exterior of the galaxy were moving as quickly as the ones at the center, which didn’t match Newtonian gravitational theory.

The researcher ultimately concluded that a powerful invisible form of matter was driving the speeds of the outside stars. This matter was ultimately dubbed ‘dark matter’. This form of matter had been proposed by Swiss astrophysicist Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s, but Rubin’s work was the first to confirm that it existed.

Discovering Dark Matter

Along with her radical research on dark matter, Rubin was a pioneer and groundbreaking advocate of women in the sciences. Although, becoming a female astrophysicist in the middle of the 20th century was partly an accident. She was interested in astronomy from an early age and it became her passion. She once told an interviewer breaking into the all-male field was not even on her radar at the time.

“I didn’t know a single astronomer, male or female,” she said in the interview, republished in her book Bright Galaxies, Dark Matters. “I didn’t think that all astronomers were male, because I didn’t know.”

As she progressed, the shortage of women in her field likely became obvious. According to a profile on Rubin from Cosmic Horizons, she was the only astronomy graduate from the women’s college Vassar in 1948.

She was turned down by Princeton’s astronomy program because it did not admit women, a policy in position until 1975. So she studied at Cornell and Georgetown, beginning her Ph.D. program at the age of 23, raising one young child and pregnant with another.

Rubin was later elected to the National Academy of Sciences and presented the National Medal of Science. Throughout most of her adult life, she pushed for women to be accepted to scientific institutions and organizations.

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Image credit: Carnege Institution 

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