Astronomy

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Women’s work VE How RUBIN discovered In the late 1970s, Vera Rubin and Kent Ford of the Carnegie Institution of Washington stared, confused, at the punch-card readouts from their observations of the Andromeda Galaxy. The vast spiral seemed to be rotating all wrong. The stuff at the edges was moving just as fast as the stuff near the center, apparently violating Newton’s Laws of Motion (which also govern how the planets move around our Sun). While the explanation for that strange behavior didn’t become clear to Rubin until two years later, these printouts represented the first direct evidence of dark matter. Scientists now know that dark matter comprises some 84 percent of the universe’s material. Its invisible particles swarm and stream and slam through the whole cosmos. It affects how stars move within galaxies, how galaxies tug on each other, and how all that matter clumped together in the first place. It is to the cosmos like air is to humans: ubiquitous, necessary, unseen but felt. The discovery of this strange substance deserves a Nobel Prize. But, for Rubin, none has come, although she has long been a “people’s choice” and predicted winner. In the past few years, scientists have gotten that free trip to Sweden for demonstrating that neutrinos have mass, for inventing blue LEDs, for isolating graphene’s single carbon layer, and for discovering dark energy. All of these experiments and ideas are worthy of praise, and some, like dark energy, even tilted the axis of our understanding of the universe. But the graphene work began in 2004; dark energy observations happened in the late ’90s; scientists weighed neutrinos around the same time; and blue LEDs burst onto the scene a few years before that. Rubin’s work on dark matter, on the other hand, took place in the 1970s. It’s like the committee cannot see her, although nearly all of astrophysics feels her influence. Rubin is now 87. She is too infirm for interviews. And because the Nobel can only be awarded to the living, time is running out for her. Vera Rubin, with collaborator Kent Ford, is responsible for finding dark matter, one of the most fundamental discoveries of the past century in astrophysics. Yet a Nobel Prize still eludes her. PETER GINTER, GETTY IMAGES 26 ASTRONOMY • JUNE 2016
dark matter This famous astronomer carved herself a well-deserved place in history, so why doesn’t the Nobel committee see it that way? by Sarah Scoles
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Astronomy

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