Telescope reminds us of the debt we owe Vera Rubin
NSF-DOE VERA C RUBIN OBSERVATORY/AP
T he American astronomer Vera C Rubin, who died in 2016, was certainly given enormous recognition and credit for her work in her lifetime. Her stellar career led to medals, prizes and awards all over the world. She did not, however, receive the Nobel prize for physics for her pioneering study of galaxy rotation rates in the 1960s and 1970s, work subsequently accepted as strong evidence for the existence of dark matter. Dark matter and dark energy are now thought to comprise 95 per cent of the mass-energy content of the universe.
Rubin had to battle prejudice against women in science for many decades. If she did miss out on a Nobel because of her gender, she would not be alone. The shabby failure to fully credit Rosalind Franklin's contribution to the double helix breakthrough is well known. Lisa Meitner, 'the mother of the atomic bomb', was even more ruthlessly snubbed, while her partner in nuclear fission research, Otto Hahn, bagged a Nobel.
The brilliance of Marietta Blau, Jocelyn Bell Burnell and Chien-Shiung Wu was also overlooked by Stockholm, while many of their male collaborators were laureated. In Rubin's own field, the great Edwin Hubble, whose work drew on that of Henrietta Swan Leavitt, acknowledged the huge debt he owed her.
Just as Hubble gave his name to a revolutionary telescope, so too did Rubin, when the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in Chile was renamed the Vera C Rubin Observatory in her honour. The first images from this huge yet agile device were published this week, capturing 2,000 undetected asteroids within ten hours. Over the next decade, the southern night sky will be continuously mapped and supernova explosions from billions of years ago will be traced. If our solar system does have a mysterious Planet Nine, Rubin will find it.
Perhaps somewhere in those heavens she did so much to demystify, Vera Rubin is having the last laugh.
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