Astronomy => Dark matter.

Vera Rubin was an American astronomer who pioneered work on galaxy rotation rates and produced the first widely accepted evidence for the existence of dark matter.

She was born in 1928 in Pennsylvania, USA. Her family moved to Washington DC in 1938. Rubin attempted to enroll in the astronomy program at Princeton, but was barred due to her gender.

Later she started working at the Carnegie Institution where Rubin began work related to her controversial thesis regarding galaxy clusters in tandem with Kent Ford, making hundreds of observations using Ford’s image-tube spectrograph. This image intensifier allowed resolving the spectra of astronomical objects that were previously too dim for spectral analysis. A decade of observations coalesced in the shared discovery of the Rubin-Ford effect, with publication first appearing in 1976.

She famously created a women’s restroom at the Palomar Observatory in 1965, the first time a woman was officially invited to observe there. Not having a women’s bathroom was the excuse for not admitting women, as was not uncommon in the US up till the late 1960ies. When she arrived, the bathroom door was labeled “MEN”. She took a pen and some tape, drew a figure of a woman wearing a skirt, and affixed it to the door, declaring, “There you go; now you have a ladies’ room”

When Rubin was elected to the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) in 1981, she became only the second woman astronomer in its ranks (after her colleague Margaret Burbidge). She said that despite her own election to the NAS, she continued to be dissatisfied with the low number of women who were elected each year, and she further said it was “the saddest part of her life”.

Vera Rubin died at age 88 in 2016.

In 2019, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in Chile, was renamed the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in recognition of Rubin’s contributions to the study of dark matter and her outspoken advocacy for the equal treatment and representation of women in science.