![]() ![]() That Rubin has not yet been awarded the Nobel Prize is both a travesty and a testament to our culture’s long history of inequality in science. Rubin did become one - one of the greatest ones who ever lived - whilst raising three children of her own, all of whom grew up to earn doctorates in science, including a daughter who became an astronomer herself. Decades later, after she broke the glass ceiling in astronomy by becoming the first woman permitted to observe at the prestigious Palomar Observatory and went on to discover dark matter, Rubin reflected: “It never occurred to me that I couldn’t be an astronomer.” She traced the firmness of that conviction to a children’s book about Maria Mitchell - America’s first woman astronomer and a lifelong champion of women in science - which had expanded her horizon of possibility and seeded the idea that she, a little girl amid a culture impoverished of such role models, could one day become an astronomer. ![]() When pioneering scientist Vera Rubin was a little girl in the 1930s, she longed to be an astronomer but had never met a sole person of that vocation in real life. ![]()
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