The Vera Rubin dead news has been saddening. She helped find powerful evidences on the dark matter. It happened Sunday night, she was 88.
His son Allan Rubin confirmed the news. Allan Rubin is a professor of geosciences at Princeton University. He also said that his mother died of natural causes. He added that Philadelphia native has been living in the Princeton area.
Dark matter is an unseen matter, that may make up more than ninety percent of the universe. As the name implies, dark matter does not interact with light or other electromagnetic radiation, so it cannot be seen directly, but it can be detected by measuring its gravitational effects.
Matthew Scott, the president of the Carnegie Institution said that they were saddened by the Vera Rubin dead news. He added that Rubin is a national treasure, as an accomplished astronomer and a wonderful role model for young scientists.
In 1993, Bill Clinton presented a National Medal of Science to Vera Rubin, because of her scientific achievements. She also became the second female astronomer to be elected to the National Academy of Science.
Philip Cooper, Vera Rubin's father, helped her build a telescope, and brought her to amateur astronomers meetings. Her interest about astronomy started there.
Rubin stated in an interview in 1995 with the American Institute of Physics. Though her parents were supportive about the career she chose, her father suggested that she rather becomes a mathematician. Her father was concerned about the difficulty of making a living out of being an astronomer.
According to ABC News, in 1948 she was the only astronomy major student to graduate from Vassar College. As much as she would like to enroll as a graduate student at Princeton, she learned women were not allowed in the university's graduate astronomy program. She pursued her master's degree from Cornell University.
She earned her doctorate from Georgetown University, and worked as a faculty member for several years. After that, she worked in a nonprofit scientific research center at the Carnegie Institution in Washington.
According to CBS News, Rubin never received the Nobel Prize. There are scientist that thinks she deserved the Nobel Prize, one of these is an astronomer at the University of Washington in Seattle, Emily Levesque. Vera Rubin dead, is a really devastating news to her field of science.
