Shining light on scientific superstar

Nearly 80 years ago, a promising astronomy student named Vera Rubin passed up the opportunity for graduate study at Harvard. Now, a decade after her death, the pioneering astronomer will be celebrated on campus as a scientific superstar.

Rubin, whose discoveries about dark matter transformed astronomy and physics, will be honored with a weeklong series of events starting June 23, including the first public release of images from a new observatory bearing her name and the unveiling of a commemorative quarter.

“Intellectually, we’re all still staggering around with the consequences of the astronomy that she did,” said Christopher W. Stubbs, the Samuel C. Moncher Professor of Physics and of Astronomy and a member of the scientific team for the new observatory. “She brought scientific chaos that we’ve all been wrestling with ever since.”

The celebration will kick off Monday with a livestream of the first images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a new astronomy and astrophysics facility in Cerro Pachón, Chile — a mountaintop site chosen because its aridity and its 2,600-meter altitude offer clear views of the sky.

Funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy, the 350-ton instrument is the most powerful survey telescope in the world and incorporates the largest digital camera ever constructed. It will take detailed images of the Southern Hemisphere sky to compile ultra-wide, ultra-high-definition, time-lapse video of the cosmos.

The first images will be released at 11 a.m. The main unveiling will take place at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington, D.C., and will be available online and to watch parties around the globe. The Harvard gathering will begin at 10:30 a.m. in Jefferson Lab 250.

More than two decades ago, Stubbs was among a group of scientists who won a federal grant to begin planning the new telescope. That proposal eventually grew into the $800 million observatory that will begin service this month after many twists and turns and collaborations with other institutions.

Stubbs said the new images will be spectacular.

“When you look at these pictures, you just kind of go, ‘Wow, look at all those galaxies!’” he said. “It’s like a wallpaper of galaxies — near ones, far ones, red ones, blue ones, interacting, colliding, different shapes, different sizes.”

The telescope will repeatedly sweep the sky in a 10-year survey. It will produce 20 terabytes of data every night and in one year will generate more optical astronomy data than all previous telescopes combined.

“For solar system science, it’s a huge advance,” said Matt Holman, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. “It’s going to find nearly a factor of 10 more objects than we presently know, ranging from asteroids that we’re concerned might hit the Earth, to the most distant Kuiper Belt objects, and perhaps even planets in our solar system that we don’t know about.”

On Thursday, Harvard will host a series of talks and a science festival to celebrate Rubin. The event will coincide with the release of the Rubin quarter, part of a U.S. Mint program honoring influential American women.

Rubin is best known as the scientist who shined light on dark matter. Born in 1928, she became fascinated by astronomy as a child looking at stars outside her bedroom window.

She studied astronomy at Vassar College and won admission to the graduate program at Harvard, but chose to study at Cornell because her new husband was enrolled there.

As she later recalled, the director of the Harvard observatory sent a formal letter acknowledging her withdrawal and added a handwritten note: “Damn you women. Every time I get a good one ready, she goes off and gets married.”

Later, Rubin earned a Ph.D. from Georgetown and studied the properties and motions of distant galaxies.

As a female scientist, she repeatedly encountered condescension from male colleagues and difficulty accessing scientific facilities and conferences. She spent most of her career as a researcher at the Carnegie Institute in Washington, D.C., and raised four children, all of whom became scientists.

She is best known for her work showing that most of the universe is invisible. Her calculations showed that galaxies must contain at least five to 10 times more mass than can be observed directly based on the light emitted by ordinary matter.

By the time she died in 2016 at age 88, her discoveries had been largely affirmed.

“First of all, she made an amazing discovery, and anyone of any background who does that is worthy of respect,” said Elana Urbach, a Harvard postdoctoral researcher who works with data from the new Rubin observatory and is organizing the campus celebration. “But the fact that she made this amazing discovery with the adversity that she faced does add something to her story — and make her more of a role model.”