Vera Rubin broke the barrier at Palomar Observatory

Person: Vera Rubin
Lived: 1928–2016
Field: Astronomy
From: American

The story

In the mid-twentieth century the Palomar Observatory in southern California, home to one of the largest telescopes in the world, was one of the most important places in the world to do astronomy. It was also effectively closed to women observers. A common excuse, used at several observatories of the period, was that the facilities had no women's bathroom. A decade earlier Margaret Burbidge had gained access to the telescope at Mount Wilson only under the pretence that her husband Geoffrey was the observer.

Vera Rubin had by then earned her doctorate at Georgetown University in 1954 and spent ten years teaching and researching there. In 1965 she joined the Carnegie Institution of Washington's Department of Terrestrial Magnetism, and that same year she applied for observing time at Palomar. She was granted it, reluctantly, and became the first woman permitted to observe there; the Jewish Women's Archive notes that she was the first to do so officially, under her own name, as a guest investigator.

She was told that her time at the observatory was limited because there was no women's bathroom. According to the Carnegie president Eric Isaacs, she solved the problem by cutting out a small paper skirt and taping it to the stick figure on the men's room door. The Princeton astrophysicist Neta Bahcall recalled her announcing that now there was a ladies' room. Then she got to work.

The gesture became part of astronomical folklore, but its importance went beyond humour. Access to the world's largest telescopes was essential to the work that soon followed, as Rubin and the instrument-maker Kent Ford began measuring how fast stars orbit inside galaxies. Those observations produced the flat rotation curves that became the first persuasive evidence for dark matter.

Rubin never treated her own entry as enough. She went on to campaign for women observers, for women's admission to Washington's Cosmos Club and for more women in the National Academy of Sciences. Carnegie Science listed her advocacy for women observers at Palomar among the causes she championed throughout her life, alongside her achievements in research.

Why it matters

Rubin's breakthrough at Palomar helped end the exclusion of women from major observatories, and observing time at the world's great telescopes is now open to astronomers of any sex.