Discover and read the best of Twitter Threads about #BirthdayVeraRubin
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Today is astronomer and trailblazer Vera Rubin's birthday. In 1965, she became the first woman to enter Palomar observatory, where she made the groundbreaking discovery of dark matter in Andromeda via its gravitational interactions with Kent Ford. #BirthdayVeraRubin (1/n) 
Fritz Zwicky inferred its existence in 1930s in the Coma cluster using the virial theorem, but highly overestimated the dark matter content. Vera Rubin definitively proved dark matter exists; her calculations are still relevant today. Dark Matter Queen. #BirthdayVeraRubin (2/n)
In 2011, when physicists won the Nobel Prize in Physics for discovering dark energy, stuff that's causing the Universe's expansion to accelerate w/ time, I was sure Vera Rubin was next! After all, we understand dark energy far less than we do dark matter. #BirthdayVeraRubin (3/n)
Astronomer Vera Rubin was born #OTD in 1928. Her work on galactic rotation curves became one of the main pieces of evidence for the existence of dark matter, and she deserved a Nobel Prize for it. #BirthdayVeraRubin
Image: Vassar College / Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
Image: Vassar College / Emilio Segrè Visual Archives
The modern case for dark matter began with Fritz Zwicky in the 1930s. His observations of galaxies in the Coma Cluster suggested there simply wasn't enough luminous matter present to gravitationally hold everything together. Hence, there must be matter there that you can't see.
Around that same time, a young Vera Rubin was looking up at the night sky in wonder, memorizing the paths of meteors and pondering the stars.
In interviews, she would often say “I just couldn’t look at the sky without wondering how anyone could do anything but study the stars.”
In interviews, she would often say “I just couldn’t look at the sky without wondering how anyone could do anything but study the stars.”
