Archival Feature: Vera Rubin Made Dark Matter A Household Name

As Halloween approaches, we enjoy tales of ghosts and spooky stories as we remember how our ancestors tried to make sense of the invisible and unknown in our universe. Few cosmic phantoms are as mysterious as dark matter. In this archival feature originally published by Smithsonian Magazine on December 28, 2016 (just days after her passing), writer Linda Kramer traces how astronomer Vera Rubin fought through systemic biases to fundamentally change our understanding of the universe, proving that most of the cosmos remains hidden in the dark.

 Vera Rubin measuring spectra in 1974 at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution in Washington, D.C. 
Photo: NOIRLab via Wikimedia Commos

“I remember being startled even that first night,” says Vera Rubin. On November 14, 1977, she and colleague Kent Ford were down at the big Mayall telescope at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona, testing a brand-new technique to study the motions of stars within spiral galaxies. And Rubin, who has the air of a feisty, energetic grandmother (which she is), couldn’t wait to see how things were turning out. So every now and again she left Ford at the helm of the telescope and took a freshly exposed photographic plate downstairs to the observatory’s darkroom, where she developed it on the spot.

What each plate recorded (they hoped) was the spectrum of each galaxy, from the brightest point in its center to the faintest edges of its spiral arms.

Read the full article at:Vera Rubin Made “Dark Matter” a Household Phrase (Smithsonian Magazine).

Meanwhile, Rubin's work continues today. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile, featuring the world’s largest digital camera, is currently executing its 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST). By mapping billions of galaxies and probing weak gravitational lensing, the observatory bearing her name is carrying forward her work—moving astrophysics from demonstrating that dark matter exists to uncovering what this celestial phantom actually is.