2016 was a subjectively bad year for most people around the world. A lot of our favourite celebrities died and the US election was…well, interesting, to say the least. But there was one more thing that happened in 2016. It occurred with little report, with few eulogies. Vera Rubin, a pioneer in physics and astronomy, died at the age of 88 on December 25th, 2016.
She was Vassar College’s only BA of astronomy graduate in 1948. When Yale didn’t even acknowledge her application to their graduate astronomy program (they wouldn’t accept women in that program until 1975), she went to Cornell, studying physics and quantum physics. It was there that her work began to have effect in the world of academia: her thesis, written on the movement of galaxies, directly opposed the pre-existing idea (based on the Big Bang theory) that galaxies just rotated outwards infinitely. Rather, she argued, they rotated around unknown central points.
The Big Bang was the cornerstone of how people understood, and still understand, astronomy and the physics of space. Opposing it was nearly unheard of, and as a result, the paper based on Rubin’s thesis was rejected by multiple astronomy journals.
So what’s a girl to do? Clearly, write more controversial science.
Her dissertation, which concluded that galaxies aren’t randomly strewn about the universe, was less controversial than her previous work on how they moved. Still, it was a subject no one else would touch until the 1970’s.
It wasn’t long before she and her colleague, Kent Ford, were back in the business of pulling apart everything we knew about galaxies until this point. Rubin returned to research similar to that of her dissertation. Avoiding the mistake made the last few times (it was argued that she didn’t have enough evidence to support her 1954 master’s thesis, similar arguments were made towards her dissertation), they analyzed hundreds of pieces of evidence, spending years staring at the cosmos. By taking a sample, they discovered that galaxies moved, as a whole, towards a particular point in space. Sure, it’s still a contested piece of science, but the Rubin-Ford Effect (as it’s called) changed how we looked at movement in the cosmos.
Vera Rubin finds herself changing the world of dark matter without really intending to at first. It was while studying the rotation of galaxies (again), this time based on the 1939 work of Babcock, that she discovered some previously unknown facts about dark matter. At this point, the academics in the world of physics knew about dark matter. They also knew that galaxies are spinning way too quickly to be held together by stars near the middle (thanks to Rubin’s controversial master’s thesis). Using a lot of complicated mathematics, Rubin managed to prove that galaxies have to contain at least six times more dark matter than they do regular matter. She proved, consequently, that Newton’s theories of gravity don’t work everywhere, that gravity isn’t the only thing holding galaxies together, etc.
Nobody was really sure of the existence of dark matter until Vera Rubin proved it held together galaxies. So, pretty much, everything that physicists know about dark matter today is based on Vera Rubin proving that it exists. Everything we know about how galaxies move is based on Vera Rubin proving that Newtonian gravity theories don’t work for long distances, that galaxies don’t just expand forever, and that galaxies seem to sort of move together, rather than randomly move about.
In short, this one woman pushing the envelope, fighting for her right to be in otherwise male-dominated areas, and pulling apart what was untouchable science at the time is responsible for some of the biggest discoveries about our universe to date. Let’s celebrate her revolutionary discoveries and keep on pushing the envelope of whatever field we’re interested in pursuing!