![In this image taken in the 1970s and provided by the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Vera Rubin uses a measuring engine.](http://web.archive.org./web/20170517084100im_/https://www.fairfaxstatic.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/i/d/d/s/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gtid1t.png/1488852258048.jpg)
Over the last few years I started and abandoned many, many emails to the late, great Vera Rubin, mainly because they all seemed to simply be love letters to a pioneer of astrophysics.
I always wanted to interview her but could never quite pitch the story in a way that interested a publication: sciencey ones thought it too political, mainstream ones thought it too sciencey. But here's the story I always wanted to tell:
Vera Rubin did exactly what so many female scientists did throughout history: she was just straight up better at her job than her male colleagues. And, like so many female scientists, it generally wasn't enough.
Her love was astronomy, although she ended up having to move into the field sideways via physics at Cornell University, since women simply weren't eligible to apply for postgraduate astronomy courses.
She had the support of her husband, Robert, who was also a distinguished academic and scientist, but in the 1950s and 1960s there was only so much she could do. She published several controversial papers and slowly built a name for herself, but her career stalled because she essentially had to progress by stealth, getting teaching and professorial positions that helped her gain qualifications and experience while raising her four children (all of whom became significant scientists in their own right).
In 1965, Rubin became the first woman to get viewing time at the Palomar Observatory – an honour denied to women, including Rubin, in many observatories, up until that point. And sure, it looked like pure sexism – but as they argued at the time, there were no female-specific toilets, and obviously those lady scientists couldn't possibly use the toilets for the men.
Rubin had done some important early work on the newly discovered field of pulsars, but when it became the sexy subject for ambitious (male) astronomers determined to make their mark, Rubin was effectively squeezed out. By this point she'd tired of having every paper and presentation aggressively picked over by male colleagues certain that this uppity dame mustn't know what she was talking about.
As she later explained: "I decided to pick a problem that I could go observing and make headway on – hopefully, a problem that people would be interested in, but not so interested in that anyone would bother me before I was done."
Specifically, she looked at how many stars were contained in galaxies – literally counting the things from plates of astronomical observations – and in so doing discovered something that no-one else had noticed, because she was a goddamn genius: that there weren't nearly enough stars in galaxies for them to hold together under their own gravity, given the speed at which galaxies rotate.
She was well poised to make that connection, mind. Along with colleague Kent Ford, Rubin had previously determined that the stars in the outer arms of spiral galaxies rotate at the same speed as those closer to the centre, which was very, very weird. (It's not what happens in the solar system, where, for example, far off planets like Uranus and Neptune take decades to circle the sun, while Mercury, closest to the sun, zips around in a mere 88 days.)
If galaxies were only made of stars, she realised, those stars should all have been flung out into the cosmos aeons ago. Something else had to be there holding galaxies together; something with a hell of a lot of mass, greater than the normal matter making up the bright stars. In fact, by her calculations, the stuff we can see must only be between 10 and 15 per cent of the total matter in the universe.
In other words, she discovered the existence of dark matter, thanks to a job her male colleagues thought too boring and menial to bother with.
She wasn't the first to come up with the idea, but she was the first to spend years painstakingly collecting the data to support it, which involved mapping over 200 galaxies.
Despite making what is probably the single most significant advance in cosmology in the late 20th Century, she never won a Nobel Prize.
She also kept teaching until her death, as best I can tell, and was a tireless advocate for women in science.
She was one of my heroes, she illuminated the unseen universe, and she died on Christmas Day at the age of 88.
Rest well, Dr Rubin. You earned it.
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