Cross-post: Vera Rubin found a lifetime of wonder in the dark skies

Eds. Note: On July 23, Vera Rubin would have turned 96.

By Elizabeth Gamillo for Astronomy magazine

Image Credit: Mark Godfrey (PNAS).

A century ago galaxies in our universe perplexed astronomers. Just a decade after the realization of what galaxies are, astronomers first noticed that spiral galaxies were rotating strangely. Their outer areas were rotating around the galactic centers nearly as quickly as their inner “hubs.” Something must have been helping the rotation along. In 1933, astronomer Fritz Zwicky first suggested that an unseen component, which he called dark matter, must exist.

Three decades after dark matter was hypothesized, in a breakthrough moment, one astronomer collected the first direct evidence of dark matter’s existence. Her name was Vera Rubin, and her work helped to revolutionize astronomy in the middle part of the 20th Century.

Read more about Vera Rubin and her legacy at

https://www.astronomy.com/science/vera-rubin-found-a-lifetime-of-wonder-in-the-dark-skies/

Read the 2016 astrobites article at

https://astrobites.org/2016/12/27/how-one-person-discovered-the-majority-of-the-universe-the-work-of-vera-rubin/