Depending on how many science classes you’ve taken, you’ve probably heard names of famous scientists; Einstein, Newton, Feynman. Many of the scientists in text books are male, with the occasional exception left for Miss Curie and her detection of radioactive isotopes.
But there are so many great women! In all of the sciences, there are women who have (almost silently) almost changed entire fields based on their work. Vera Rubin is one of these women.
Before we get to her discovery, we need to talk about what lead up to it. In the past the universe was mostly thought of as static and unmoving. After some careful observation it was found that the universe was actually expanding (a result of the initial expansion of the big bang more on that here)!
Vera Rubin is an interesting woman, she had been interested in astronomy since a very young age. Her father helped her to construct a telescope. Eventually she graduated from Vasser with a degree in astronomy. Later she famously applied to Princeton but was denied on the basis that she was a woman (this rule was not revised until 1975). After her rejection she decided to finish her Ph.D at Georgetown University, where it is said that her husband would wait patiently in the car while she went to school because she did not like driving.
After this, she began doing some work with spectroscopy. Remember all of that stuff above about the universe expanding? We measure that by looking a a phenomenon called “Red Shifting” (this phenomenon needs it’s very own post, but here is something to tide you over). So Vera was looking at this phenomenon and noticed something very suspicious. You see if the universe were expanding at a constant rate, and the universe came from the same place, there should be a sort of slow down in far away galaxies and stars. But the far away galaxies were moving much faster! There wasn’t enough gravity in the universe to account for this though, what was happening?
Vera had discovered something that is still puzzling scientists today, called “Dark Matter” this stuff surrounds us, and yet it doesn’t (directly) interact with us. Because of her discovery, we are able to make great predictions about how objects interact with one another in space.
Here is something else interesting about dark matter: just how much of it there is in the universe! First I want you to think about how much matter there is in the universe just close your eyes and think about every star, every planet, every single speck of dust floating in the universe. Done thinking? Now multiply that by 10. There is a 10:1 ratio of dark matter to our “regular matter”. We wouldn’t know about it at all if it weren’t for Vera Rubin.
Vera Rubin is currently 83 years old and still does astronomy.
