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Today, the world will get its first glimpse at the cosmos through the eyes of the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is perched atop Cerro Pachón, a nearly 9,000-foot peak in Chile. The Rubin Observatory is kicking off a decade-long “movie” shoot: With the world’s largest camera ever constructed and one of the most powerful telescopes, the observatory will capture vast swaths of the visible sky, providing a super-crisp, unprecedented “time-lapse” of the universe. To check out the earliest public images, you can even join a watch party near you.
But who is the observatory’s namesake astronomer?
Vera Rubin is best known for presenting the first sound evidence of dark matter—an elusive substance that makes up more than 80 percent of our universe, yet doesn’t interact with light or other electromagnetic radiation, making it impossible to glimpse directly through a telescope. Her central scientific accomplishment involved discovering a mismatch between the predicted angular motion of galaxies and the observed motion of galaxies. Rubin’s calculations offered a solution to this so-called “galaxy rotation problem” by suggesting that galaxies must contain at least 10 times as much mass as can be accounted for by the visible stars. This invisible mass constituted evidence for what astronomers had earlier proposed to be dark matter.
Rubin became a cosmological giant against the odds, illuminating a path for future female astronomers. Rubin, who passed away at age 88 in 2016, dreamed of space from an early age, constructing a telescope out of cardboard as a child. Yet as early as high school, she was urged to avoid a career in science. Rubin ignored this advice and attended Vassar College in New York because the first nationally recognized female astronomer, Maria Mitchell, had taught there in the institution’s early years. She went on to juggle family and her studies, earning her Master’s degree at Cornell University, where she studied under Richard Feynman and others, and then a doctorate from Georgetown University in 1954 while caring for four children. Even as a graduate student, her observations of galactic dynamics were years ahead of their time.
Throughout her career, Rubin encountered glaring sexism, including pushback from observatories she sought to use for her work. The Palomar Observatory in California, for instance, didn’t even have a women’s bathroom when she arrived there in 1964. Rubin, the first woman invited to use the observatory, responded by taping a cut-out of a paper skirt to the stick figure on the door of the men’s room.
Rubin worked tirelessly to eliminate obstacles for female astronomers. Noticing that women researchers were almost never elected to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, and rarely won prizes from the American Astronomical Society, she persistently nominated female scientists for these accolades and encouraged others to follow suit. Rubin is also remembered for mentoring promising female astronomers.
Today, the Vera Rubin observatory will carry on her legacy—by combing through billions of far-off galaxies, the powerful camera could pick up on new hints of dark matter twisting the shapes of galaxies as they spin through the cosmos. 
Lead photo: Vera Rubin measuring spectra in 1974 at the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institution. Credit: NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / Wikipedia
