Obituary: Vera Rubin died on December 25th

WHEN in 1965 Vera Rubin arrived for a four-day stint at “the monastery”, as the Palomar Observatory, home of the world’s largest telescope, was dubbed, there were no women’s lavatories. No female astronomer had ever worked there before. How could they, when it would mean walking home late at night?

It had been the same thinking at high school. When she told her revered science teacher of her scholarship to Vassar he said: “You should do OK as long as you stay away from science.” She was the only astronomy major to graduate there in her year. When in 1947 she requested a graduate-school catalogue from Princeton, the dean told her not to bother: women were not accepted for physics and astronomy. George Gamow, later her doctoral adviser, said she could not attend his lecture at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab “because wives were not allowed”.

She was indeed a wife. She married—aged 19—Robert Rubin, a physicist whom she followed to Cornell, sacrificing her place at Harvard. He was, she said, her greatest ally. Later, when she attended night classes at Georgetown University, he drove her there, eating his dinner in the car until he could drive her home, while her parents baby-sat. Still, she found raising four children “almost overwhelming”. When she halted her academic career—the worst six months of her life—she wept every time the Astrophysical Journal arrived in the house. But, working part-time, she made sure to be home when the kids returned from school. She never inspected their rooms, she said, and they grew up fine, all with PhDs in science or maths.

Her master’s thesis was, her Cornell supervisor said, worthy of being presented to the American Astronomical Society. But she was about to give birth, so, he suggested, he would present it—but in his name.

She refused. Her parents drove up from Washington and took their 22-year-old daughter, nursing her newborn, on a gruelling snowy trip from upstate New York to Philadelphia . She addressed the roomful of strangers for ten minutes about galaxy rotation, soaked up some patronising criticism and a smidgen of praise—and left.

Though rows were unpleasant, defeat was worse. “Protest every all-male meeting, every all-male department, every all-male platform,” she advised. At Palomar, she made a ladies’ room by sticking a handmade skirt sign on a men’s room door (she returned a year later: it was gone).

She’d never anticipated such problems. Her father encouraged her childhood habit of watching meteor showers, leaning out of her bedroom window and memorising their geometry in order to look them up later. He even helped her make her first telescope, from a cardboard tube; she had already made her own kaleidoscope. She hadn’t ever met an astronomer, but it never occurred to her that she couldn’t be one.

But her early research was largely ignored. In other work, male astronomers elbowed her aside. Fed up, she looked for a problem “that people would be interested in, but not so interested in that anyone would bother me before I was done.”

She found it. In the 1930s Fritz Zwicky, an idiosyncratic Swiss astrophysicist, had suggested that the brightly shining stars represented only a part of the cosmic whole. There must also be “dark matter”, unseen but revealed indirectly by the effects of its gravity. That conjecture languished on the margins until Ms Rubin, working with her colleague Kent Ford, examined the puzzle of galactic rotation. Spiral galaxies such as Andromeda, she proved, were spinning so fast that their outer stars should be flying away into the never-never. They weren’t. So either Einstein was wrong about gravity, or gravitational pull from vast amounts of something invisible—dark matter—was holding the stars together.

The discovery reshaped cosmology, though initially her colleagues embraced it unenthusiastically. Astronomers had thought they were studying the whole universe, not just a small luminous fraction of it. New theories developed on what the matter might be—but its fugitive particles escaped all direct detection.

Some are worried by the absence. Ms Rubin was unbothered. Astronomy, she reckoned, was “out of kindergarten, but only in about the third grade”. Many of the universe’s deep mysteries remained to be discovered by eye and brain, with all the joy that involved.

Shining a light

There were other scientific feats, too: in 1992 she discovered NGC 4550, a galaxy in which half the stars orbit in one direction, mingled with half that head the other way. She won medals aplenty: the Gold Medal of Britain’s Royal Astronomical Society (last awarded to a woman in 1828) and America’s National Medal of Science. Princeton, which had once shunned her, was among the many universities to award her an honorary doctorate. She gave notable commencement speeches.

The plaudits were pleasant, but numbers mattered more: the greatest compliment would be if astronomers years hence still used her data, she insisted. She was a perennial favourite for a Nobel prize in physics—only ever awarded to two women. That call never came: like dark matter, her fans lamented, she was vitally important, but easy to overlook.