Ashley Yeager: The Brilliant Legacy of Astronomer Vera Rubin (#175)

Into the Impossible With Brian Keating

Ashley Yeager is an associate editor at The Scientist. Previously, she worked as a freelance writer, editor and multimedia producer, and also at the Simons Foundation as a science writer, at Science News as a web producer and at Duke University as a writer and multimedia producer. She has an undergraduate degree in journalism from the University of Tennessee and a master's in science writing from MIT. She co-chairs the education committee of the National Association of Science Writers.

Twitter: @ashleyjyeager

In Bright Galaxies, Dark Matter, and Beyond, Ashley Jean Yeager tells the story of Rubin's life and work, recounting her persistence despite early dismissals of her work and widespread sexism in science.

Yeager describes Rubin's childhood fascination with stars, her education at Vassar and Cornell, and her marriage to a fellow scientist. At first, Rubin wasn't taken seriously; she was a rarity, a woman in science, and her findings seemed almost incredible. Some observatories in midcentury America restricted women from using their large telescopes; Rubin was unable to collect her own data until a decade after she had earned her PhD. Still, she continued her groundbreaking work, driving a scientific revolution. She received the National Medal of Science in 1993, but never the Nobel Prize—perhaps overlooked because of her gender. She's since been memorialized with a ridge on Mars, an asteroid, a galaxy, and most recently, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory—the first national observatory named after a woman.

• 00:00:00 Intro
• 00:03:57 Vera Rubin as a Scientist.
• 00:09:27 Contributions of the people that supported Vera Rubin.
• 00:11:09 Vera Rubin during WWII
• 00:15:17 The rotational model of the universe.
• 00:18:57 The Vassar College Plot! Did Vera "discover" dark matter first?
• 00:22:26 The methods of Vera Rubin and her collaboration with Kent Ford
• 00:25:48 How did Vera Rubin finall gain acceptance of the dark matter phenomenon?
• 00:34:50 Vera Rubin as an advocate for women in science.

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