The groundbreaking scientist ushered in a revolution in how we think about the universe. She also lived by a set of principles that made her an exceptional human being.
“Could I come to the telescope with you?” I innocently asked the late astronomer Vera Rubin that question a few weeks after I met her in 2007.
Even then, in her late 70s, Rubin continued her trips to places such as Kitt Peak National Observatory to scour the outermost edges of far-flung galaxies in order to clock how quickly the galaxies’ stars whipped around their cores. In our solar system, Mercury whips around the sun at high velocity, while Pluto merely plods along, and astronomers naturally assumed that stars close to a galaxy’s core would similarly move faster than stars out at the edge.