Astronomer who proved dark matter dead at 88
Vera Rubin faced gender bias throughout career
Vera Rubin, an astronomer who proved the existence of dark matter, one of the fundamental principles in the study of the universe, but who battled sex discrimination throughout her career, died Dec. 25 at an assisted living facility in Princeton, N.J. She was 88.
She had dementia, said a son, Allan Rubin.
Rubin’s groundbreaking discoveries, made primarily with physicist W. Kent Ford, have revolutionized the way scientists observe, measure and understand the universe.
The concept of “dark matter,” an unknown substance among stars in distant galaxies, had existed since the 1930s, but it was not proved until Rubin’s studies with Ford in the 1970s. It is considered one of the most significant and fundamental advances in astronomy during the 20th century.
“The existence of dark matter has utterly revolutionized our concept of the universe and our entire field,” University of Washington astronomer Emily Levesque told Astronomy magazine this year. “The ongoing effort to understand the role of dark matter has basically spawned entire subfields within astrophysics and particle physics.”
Rubin, who spent most of her career at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C., continued to make new discoveries — including of previously unknown galaxies — into the 21st century. For years she was considered a leading contender for the Nobel Prize, but the award never came. Many attributed the oversight to gender bias.
The last woman to win a Nobel Prize in physics was Maria Goeppert Mayer, who shared the 1963 prize for her work on atomic structure. The only other woman to win a Nobel in physics was Marie Curie in 1903.
“Alfred Nobel’s will describes the physics prize as recognizing ‘the most important discovery’ within the field of physics,” Levesque told Astronomy magazine. “If dark matter doesn’t fit that description, I don’t know what does.”
As a girl growing up in Washington, Rubin built a rudimentary telescope out of a cardboard tube.
Early in her career, she made discoveries that challenged accepted theories in astronomy, but she was seldom taken seriously by other astronomers, most of them male. When she applied to graduate school at Princeton University in the late 1940s, she was flatly told, “Princeton does not accept women.”
Rubin forged ahead, receiving a doctorate from Georgetown University while raising four children.
“I worked for almost all of my early career as a part-time person so that I could be home at 3 o’clock, and that was after they were all in school,” Rubin told Discover magazine in 2002. “It was almost overwhelming. I did a lot of my work at home.”