Alicia Weinberger: When I first went there in the early 1990s, it was a heated, comfortable, computer-driven observation room with a bathroom and no plate on the door indicating whether it was for men or women. But I knew about Vera and the bathroom, so I went looking for the bathroom in question. [laughs] at the observatory.
Turika Bose: We hear Alicia Weinberger, an observational astronomer at the Earth and Planetary Laboratory at the Carnegie Institute of Science, talk about renowned astronomer Vera Rubin.
Clara Moskowitz: And like so many stories about women and science, this one frustratingly involves a bathroom.
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Bose: It’s 1965. music sound premiere.
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Moskowitz: Martin Luther King Jr. leads 25,000 civil rights activists to court in Selma, Alabama.
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Bose: Astronaut Ed White completes the first American spacewalk.
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Moskowitz: And female astronomers who would change the course of cosmology were initially denied visits to the Palomar Observatory because they didn’t have the proper “equipment.” In other words-
Wine Burger: They were unable to give her observation time. And she somehow learned that the facility in question had only one toilet in the dome of the telescope and a sign on the door that said “Male”.
Bose: But Vera, for example, found a way around this problem.
Wine Burger: Some time later she set out on her first observations at Palomar. So she taped a little female stick figure in a skirt and taped it to her bathroom door. Then she said she would go every time. The little stickman has been removed, but we’ll remake it and put it back in the door.
Bose: The bathroom isn’t the only bureaucratic red tape Vera Rubin faces throughout her decades-long career.
Clara: But at the age of 14, the dedicated astronomer with nothing but a cardboard telescope would go on to discover compelling evidence of dark matter.
Bose: I’m Tulika Bose, Senior Multimedia Editor. Scientific American.
Clara: My name is Clara Moskowitz. Scientific Americanand you are listening Cosmos, hurry.
Bose: It’s the last day of Women’s History Month, but you don’t need an excuse to talk about Vera Rubin.
Moskowitz: I was one of the few female physics majors at Wesleyan University. Vera Rubin made this famous discovery both because she discovered evidence of one of the greatest mysteries in science, dark matter, and because it paved her way for subsequent female astronomers. was a person. She is a classic example of a Nobel Prize stolen.
Bose: Why do you think she didn’t win the Nobel Prize?
Moskowitz: I’m sure it’s because she’s a woman. Ha. So, while some scientists have suggested that too many other researchers helped put together data on dark matter to reward her, this kind of nudging is the only way to win an award. It is widely believed to be due to gender discrimination.
Bose: We can talk about the Nobel Prize. Specifically, the fact that physics has the widest gender ratio among Nobel Prizes.
Moskowitz: But we can also talk about Vera Rubin.
Bose: A few weeks ago, I went to the Carnegie Institute of Science (formerly the Carnegie Geomagnetic Laboratory) and used the James Webb Space Telescope to film an amazing team working on exoplanets.
But it was Vera Rubin’s mentor who loomed large over the institute.
Moskowitz: what did you find?
Bose: Not only did we get to see some of the instruments she used to measure the galaxy, but some of the people in the lab talking about exoplanets knew her at one time. . And they had many memories.
Johanna Teske: I think Vera Rubin holds a special place for many astronomers. I knew her I was an intern here at Carnegie when she was a college student at American University.
Bose: I’m Johanna Teske. She is no longer an intern. She is a staff scientist there and her research focuses on the diversity of exoplanet compositions. She also co-leads a large-scale exoplanet project utilizing the James Webb Space Telescope.
Moskowitz: oh.
Bose: yes. It turns out that Vera Rubin has a long history of mentoring women in this particular department of Carnegie.
tea spoon: She really was part of an attempt to make astronomy more inclusive, increasing opportunities for women in science and astronomy.
Bose: However, Vera wasn’t all about business. Johanna’s former mentor and staff scientist who also works on exoplanets, at least according to Alicia Weinberger who first heard about it.
Wine Burger: She had a huge spectral collection of clothing, jewelry, etc. that she enjoyed wearing. The rainbow-colored beaded necklace she had. She also kept a rainbow toy on the table in her house. She enjoyed her rainbow socks….
Bose: That’s because Vera worked to take the spectrum.
Wine Burger: Here, we decompose the component of the light of the celestial body into its component colors. This gives us a lot of information about how the object works and what it is made of.
Bose: Clara, can you break down the Doppler effect a bit for us non-physics plebs?
Moskowitz: You can tell how fast something is going by looking at the color of the light coming from something in space. This is because as an object moves away from us, its light waves spread out, their frequency decreases and their wavelength increases, making them appear redder.
Bose: To do this Vera used these new instruments at Carnegie with Kent Ford. His one of these instruments, now in the Smithsonian collection of “His 101 Instruments That Made America”, is called the Image His Tube His Spectrograph, also known as a Spectrometer.
Moskowitz: Essentially, it was this instrument that was fitted to some large telescopes in the 1970s to analyze spiral galaxies. rice field.
Bose: Specifically, the Andromeda galaxy, which is about 2.5 million light years away. But she and Kent discovered something surprising about all this.
Wine Burger: Very carefully, with the help of a new instrument developed here, we were able to measure how quickly stars in the outer part of the galaxy rotate around their centers. And over the years it has been shown that most galaxies exhibit what is called a flat rotation curve.
Moskowitz: A flat curve indicates that the stars on the outer side of the galaxy are moving as fast as the stars on the inner side, which is really not what you would expect. According to basic Newtonian physics, stars actually begin to slow down as they orbit the center of the galaxy.
When Rubin began to notice that these outer stars were still moving around at high speeds, it was the first time that there must be a lot of hidden mass extending beyond the stars we see. It actually provided strong evidence.
Bose: Let’s be clear about something. It took Vera years of persistence for her colleagues to realize this. Over the decades, she provided flat curve after flat curve until the data she produced was undeniable.
Moskowitz: She didn’t win a Nobel Prize, but people noticed.
tea spoon: I was so angry that she hadn’t won a Nobel Prize while she was alive. But it doesn’t stop there. And there are many other ways to honor people.
Bose: Clara, let’s talk about the Verarubin Observatory, due to be completed in 2024.
Moskowitz: This is a giant telescope currently under construction in Chile that, when activated, will photograph the entire sky every few nights, creating highly detailed maps of the universe. One of his major goals is to investigate the nature of dark matter, which Vera Rubin helped discover.
Bose: It is also the first observatory named after a female astronomer. Too bad Rubin didn’t win the Nobel Prize…
Moskowitz: …. She won the Nobel Prize chosen by the people. If that’s the case.
Bose: I’ll leave what Alicia said.
Weinberg: She has greatly influenced the way I think about women and their capabilities in science.
Moskowitz: And I hope one day it won’t get as much attention when a woman wins a Nobel Prize. By the way, we still don’t know what dark matter is. Cosmos, Quickly was produced by myself, Turika Bose, Kelso Harper, Jeff Dervicio and Lee Billings.
Music composed by Dominic Smith.
Find Cosmos, Quickly anywhere you can get a podcast. Don’t forget to subscribe to Scientific American for more space news.
Moskowitz: At Cosmos, my name is Clara Moskowitz.
Bose: This is Turika Bose.
